Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience in the Tourism Industry: Strategies for Sustainable Destination Management

Climate change is increasingly reshaping the conditions under which tourism destinations operate, altering the natural and built assets on which visitor economies depend and exposing long-standing weaknesses in destination planning. This article examines how climate change affects tourism destinations and synthesizes the strategies available to managers, planners, and policymakers for building adaptive capacity and resilience. Drawing on an integrative review of peer-reviewed literature published between 2013 and 2022, the analysis organizes adaptation and resilience responses into four interrelated pillars: climate-risk planning and governance, resource conservation and efficiency, destination diversification, and resilient tourism infrastructure. The review finds that effective adaptation depends less on any single intervention than on the coordinated application of these pillars across scales, from individual enterprises to national tourism authorities. Coastal, mountain, urban, arid, and nature-based destinations face distinct hazard profiles, yet share common barriers to adaptation, including fragmented governance, financing constraints, and limited local technical capacity. The article proposes a conceptual framework linking climate exposure and vulnerability assessment to the four strategy pillars and to destination-level resilience outcomes, and offers practical implications for destination management organizations seeking to sustain tourism value while safeguarding the ecological and cultural assets on which that value depends.