Tourism dependency and extreme weather: developing tourism extreme weather exposure indices for Denmark

This paper develops two novel indicators, to assess the exposure of Denmark’s local tourism economy to extreme weather—the Tourism Extreme Weather Exposure Index (TEWEI) and the Total Tourism Extreme Weather Exposure Index (TTEWEI). The indices address how places with high tourism dependency face a dual form of exposure to extreme weather: direct physical impacts on infrastructure and safety, and indirect economic losses from reduced tourist activity and employment. TEWEI measures the relative exposure of local areas, highlighting that islands and coastal municipalities are particularly exposed. The TTEWEI quantifies the overall economic impact using absolute employment figures, indicating that urban agglomerations and select coastal municipalities bear the highest cost in terms of potential job losses. Our findings also reveal significant variations within traditional geographical tourism destination typologies (coastal, fjord, inland, or island), showing that even similar regions face markedly different types of extreme weather. For the Danish context, we argue that while extreme weather poses a national threat, effective mitigation requires that decision-makers allocate resources to establish flexible frameworks and tailored adaptation strategies suited to their specific exposure. The suggested dual-index approach provides a structured, transferable framework for mapping exposure at the municipal level, thereby informing place-based adaptation strategies for tourism-dependent economies.