Tourism In Turbulent Climates: Territories and Destinations between Fragmentation, (Im)Mobilities and Regenerative Futures

Climate change is profoundly reshaping global tourism, altering travel patterns, destination attractiveness and the socio-economic stability of tourism-dependent territories. Rising temperatures, sea-level rise, extreme weather events, wildfires and biodiversity loss intensify the vulnerability of destinations and redraw flows of mobility and immobility. While abundant research has framed tourism as a driver of climate change, far less attention has been paid to its exposure to climate risks and its transformative potential as a regenerative force.

In line with the Congress theme, this session reads the climate crisis as an engine of both connection and fragmentation: it generates new (im)mobilities, reshuffles hierarchies between places and fractures established tourism models, while opening spaces for adaptive governance and regeneration.

Across very different territories, destinations are being forced to rethink tourism. The session foregrounds their territorial dimension across three settings: coastal and maritime destinations (de-balnearisation, blue-green infrastructures, shift from extractive to regenerative models); mountain and inland destinations (end of snow reliability, wildfires, reinvention of inner areas); urban destinations (heat islands, overtourism, heritage at risk).

Seeking a West-East dialogue and welcoming Asian and Korean experiences, we welcome contributions on: vulnerability and resilience of tourism territories; governance beyond incremental sustainability; policies of regenerative tourism; participation, communities and territorial observatories.

The session asks what climate change is doing to the territoriality of tourism: who governs it, for whom and at which scale. We prioritise work connecting evidence to policy, mappings, scenarios, comparative analyses, experimental assessments, that shifts the debate from documenting impacts to designing transformative, territorially grounded responses.