Climate Change and Tourism in the Alps: A Position Paper in View of the Upcoming Alpine Convention Fourth Report on the State of the Alps on Sustainable Tourism

Whereas the implementation of the Tourism Protocol of the Alpine Convention seems far from its completion, the Alpine Convention fourth report on the state of the Alps "Sustainable Tourism in the Alps" is under preparation and it is expected by the end of 2012. One of the main critical challenges that Alpine tourism needs to face in the quest for sustainability is climate change. In recent years several research and cooperation projects focusing on the Alpine region have been dealing with the issue of climate change. In particular the Alpine Space Programme, starting with ClimChAlp (2006-2008), focused on the issue of adaptation to climate change in the following call (2008-2011) through several projects: CLISP, ClimAlpTour, Manfred, AdaptAlp, AlpWaterScarce, ParaMount, PermaNet, SILMAS, AlpFFIRS. These projects led to a capitalization project named C3Alps that recently started. At the same time, the Alpstar project, which also started recently, will focus on climate change mitigation and on making the Alps a carbon neutral environment. The Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) contributed to several of these Alpine Space projects (ClimChAlp, AdaptAlp, ClimAlpTour and C3Alps). Other non Alpine Space projects have also contributed to this research and cooperation issue, such as CC.ALPS (by CIPRA), KLIWA (by various German and Bavarian institutions), Histalp (Austrian weather service), etc. However, ClimAlpTour is the only project that explicitly focused on tourism. This paper builds on these projects’ findings, especially for what concerns the implications for the tourism sector, and on the existing relevant literature.