The economic dimension of climate change impacts on tourism: The case of Portugal

Climate variables such as temperature and precipitation play a crucial role on tourism flows worldwide. This places tourism at the forefront of the economic sectors to be affected by climate change. In this article, we address the impacts of climate change on the arrivals of inbound tourists to Portugal, a south European country where tourism is a core economic sector. The economic dimension of the impacts, in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) and employment, is then assessed. This is achieved by combining a world gravity model of tourism flows with an input-output model. The results show that under standard climate change scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Portugal will experience a significant increase in temperature leading to a decrease of inbound tourism arrivals between 2.5% and 5.2%. This decrease in tourist arrivals is expected to reduce Portuguese GDP between 0.19% and 0.40%.