Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

This study assesses the effects of climate change on the tourism sector across the southern Mediterranean countries and evaluates relevant policy measures addressing these challenges for the region. Tourism is an essential sector for the economy of these countries and it has a huge potential for growth and impact on job creation, development of sustainable infrastructures and understanding of how turning Climate Change issues into adaptation opportunities across the Mediterranean. The sector is nevertheless still facing a number of policy challenges that, to be fully addressed, require further action by all stakeholders at different levels of governance across institutions, research centres, operators and the civil society at large. Based on the review of publicly available secondary evidence, this paper goes beyond the current assessment on the impact of tourism on climate change and environmental sustainability. It addresses the issue from the angle of the less explored but equally worrying threat posed on the tourism sector by the effects of climate change. The evidence provided suggests the need for more effective adaptatin measures for the tourism sector across Eastern (Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Pales#ne) and Western (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) southern Mediterranean countries.
As emerging from this study, climate change pressures on the tourism sector are only partially felt today, but are bound to rapidly intensify in the coming years. Local operators are nevertheless not always fully able to respond to such pressures, due to the limited capacity to act in the longer term (beyond an annual, seasonal if not even quarterly timeframe) and as a result of an often fragmented and micro-SMEs dominated sector lacking of substantial innovation and adaptation capacity. Some degree of “market failure” in the sector therefore emerges, calling for an effective policy intervention to boost adaptation.
And yet, local policy response is nowhere near to be optimal at present. Even when some good practices have emerged, they are often partial and “on paper” rather than fostering systemic change and adaptation “in practice”. Also, some valuable climate change policies that exist in many countries are not specifically translated into sectoral tourism policies, and viceversa.
In such context, the Union for the Mediterranean can play an important role in fostering more concrete and effective measures by pushing for greater exchanges amongst local and regional sectoral stakeholders across the seabasin, as further discussed in the recommendations section of this paper.