The impact of climate change on tourism economies: Working paper series--12-01

Tourism economies depend on tourism for promoting economic growth. Tourism is obviously highly sensitive to climate. Therefore, with mounting evidence of climate change, an important question is: what is the impact of climate change on tourism economies? To answer this question, we use a model in Ng and Zhao (2010) to estimate the economic impacts of climate change on different types of economies. Our main finding is that climate change's impact on tourism economies is not smaller than its impact on other types of economies if temperature increases by more than 1 degree Celsius. Therefore, our findings suggest that tourism economies should also implement aggressive climate mitigation policy