Climate risk, uneven development, and threshold-dependent tourism resilience in selected cities of western China

Abstract Climate risk and socioeconomic development are increasingly reshaping tourism resilience, particularly in climate-sensitive and unevenly developed regions. Yet how climate risk and economic development jointly influence tourism, and how these effects vary across regions, remains insufficiently understood. Using city-level panel data for 13 cities from 2003 to 2023, this study applies panel threshold regression, interaction analysis, and contribution decomposition to investigate the nonlinear relationships among climate exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, readiness, and tourism performance. Results reveal that tourism vulnerability and resilience display pronounced threshold dependence and regional differentiation. When per capita GDP exceeds 21,357 CNY, the constraining effect of exposure is partly mitigated by stronger adaptive capacity and governance, and in some cities, exposure is reconfigured into differentiated tourism resources. By contrast, when climate risk exceeds 1.49, the negative effect of exposure intensifies, while resilience and related support conditions become more important for system stability. City-level analysis further identifies three distinct transition pathways: development-driven, tourism-driven, and risk-response, characterized respectively by resilience enhancement, improved tourism reception capacity, and heightened dependence on basic adaptive capacity and readiness under high-risk conditions. Tourism revenue is also more sensitive than tourism intensity to threshold shifts, indicating that revenue-based indicators better capture latent vulnerability and dynamic change. These findings support threshold-sensitive and place-specific sustainability governance and adaptive tourism planning in climate-sensitive and unevenly developed regions.