CLIMATE CHANGE AND CLIMATE–TOURISM RELATIONSHIPS IN GERMANY

ABSTRACT Climate change, mitigation and adaptation are highly discussed research topics. Global warming, sea level rise and extreme weather events, e.g., heat waves and storms, are closely related to climate change. That results in both negative and positive consequences for tourism. The project CAST (“climate trends and sustainable tourism development in coastal and mountain regions”) and its five sub-projects aim to answer the questions as to how the tourism potential will change and how the society will adapt to changing climate conditions. Therefore, the climatic tourism potential will be analysed under modified climate conditions by means of two different climatic sensitive regions in Germany: the North Sea and the Black Forest. Human-biometeorological computations related to tourism, based on the IPCC scenarios A1B, A2 and B1, are carried out by use of the regional climate model REMO from the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology Hamburg. Human-biometeorological, physical, thermal and aesthetic facets are used for the validation of climate-tourism relationships. The aim is to quantify the climatic tourism potential for stakeholders. Frequency classes and frequencies of extreme weather events are generated based on 10-day-intervals. The derived results, in terms of so called climate tourism information schemata (CTIS), and maps are made available for the stakeholders