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In the current climate of intense turbulence, tourism must transform to a more sustainable development platform. Yet it remains unclear how the concept of sustainability is embedded at different levels of government policy and planning, and how this has evolved over time. This paper identifies the concept of sustainability as it is articulated in 339 Australian tourism strategic planning and policy documents published between 2000 and 2011. The paper examines the extent to which the concept of sustainable tourism is evident in the discourse of Australian tourism strategic planning documents at the national, state, regional and local levels, as well as the balance of the discourse in relation to sustainability objectives. The results show that the frequency of occurrence of sustainability as a concept has slightly increased in strategies over the past decade. At the same time, there has been a shift in the conceptualisation of sustainability, with thinking evolving from nature-based, social and triple bottom line concepts toward a focus on climate change, responsibility, adaption and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism in ski resorts depends on snow cover which is expected to decline with climate change. This paper explores hypotheses about demand side responses to climatic change by analyzing patterns of visitation in recent years with differing snow cover. Snow cover and visitation patterns to six resorts which differ in altitude and size in Victoria, Australia, were compared between a slightly warm and much drier year (2006, +0.6°C and -50% precipitation to longer-term averages) to a more typical year (2007) and to nine earlier years. Snowmaking partly offset declines in natural snow cover in 2006, although there were still fewer days with snow on the ground. The number of visitor days was much lower in 2006 than the previous nine years for the three lowest-altitude resorts (-69%), while it actually increased (+10%) in the highest altitude resort where there were fewer visitors (-17%), but they stayed longer. Snowmaking is already critical for ski resorts in low snow years. With warmer conditions, lower-altitude resorts may not receive enough income due to reduced visitation to offset snowmaking costs, while higher-altitude resorts may have a short-term gain, but become uneconomical in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]