Climate Change and Urban Tourism Demand in China: Unveiling Driving Forces and Spatial–Temporal Trends

ABSTRACT The contradiction between climate change and tourism development has become increasingly prominent. This paper systematically analyses the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of urban tourism demand in China and its main climate drivers based on tourism traffic data from 289 prefecture‐level and above cities in China from 2011 to 2019. The study first identifies the overall growth trend of urban tourism demand in China, but it is accompanied by significant differences and imbalances among regions. Through regional clustering analysis, it is found that tourism demand exhibits a clear spatial clustering pattern, and there are significant differences in the mechanism of tourism development in different regions. Further combining geodetectors with multi‐scale geographically weighted regression methods, it reveals the nonlinear role relationship between climate factors and tourism demand and its spatial heterogeneity; especially under the two‐factor interaction, its explanatory power is significantly enhanced. This study deeply explores the spatial non‐stationarity between tourism demand and different influencing factors, thus revealing the evolution of the spatial pattern of tourism in China and providing strong support for optimising the structure of tourism routes and tourism products and enhancing the resilience of the tourism market to climate change.