Wildfires are currently burning around the world at an extraordinary scale, as recorded on the JRC EU Science Hub. The State of Wildfires Project report published last month concluded:
“Human-driven climate change is fundamentally altering wildfire risks worldwide. New analyses of the 2024 to 2025 fire season add to the growing evidence base that warming is making extreme wildfires more likely and more severe. Some of the most prominent extreme wildfire events of the global fire season, in Los Angeles and parts of South America, were two to three times more likely due to climate change, and the area burned by wildfires during those events was 25 to 35 times larger.”
In the academic paper accompanying the report, there are only two references to impacts on tourism in Australia and New Zealand. Wildfires are both a consequence of global warming and a cause. “Fires emitted over 8 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2024 to 2025, about 10 percent above average since 2003.”
There has been surprisingly little coverage of the impact of fire on the tourism economy. While the fires rage, they make headlines, but the economic, social, and environmental consequences are rarely addressed. Stanley, in a paper published in 1932, concluded that “forest fires do damage travel: causing discomfort and uneasiness among tourists and heavy losses to those business concerns organised to serve travellers…. In many cases, fires have wiped out pleasant recreation areas beyond recovery in the minds of the tourists who leave the areas for those kept free from fires and their indelible imprint.”
Otrachshenko and Nunes, in Fire takes no vacation: impact of fires on tourism published in Environment and Development Economics in 2022, analysed data from 278 Portuguese municipalities between 2000 and 2016 and found “a considerable negative impact of burned areas on the number of tourist arrivals, both domestic and inbound.” Their forecasts for tourism revenue losses for 2030, between €35.29 and €62.26 million, quadrupled by 2050. These are forecasts clearly based on assumptions that some will challenge, and changes in fire-risk management practices could significantly reduce the number and intensity of fires and mitigate negative economic impact.
I quote this research here because there is little in the public domain in the tourism industry, or in tourism academic or government literature. There is increasing coverage in the mainstream media. In August, Reuters quoted a Portuguese mayor: “We are being cooked alive, this cannot continue,” and reported that firefighters across Spain, Portugal, Greece, Türkiye, and the Balkans were battling wildfires as temperatures were above 40°C.
The UK Guardian newspaper in January 2024 ran an article headlined “Australia’s black summer bushfires ripped billions from the tourism industry. Is global warming making the cost of natural disasters worse?” Reporting that more than a third of Kangaroo Island, off the South Australian coast, was up in flames. The Guardian story was based on published research which reported losses of AU$2.8 billion in total output, and 7,300 jobs. Their “estimates suggest aviation shouldered the most losses in both consumption and wages or salaries, but that accommodation suffered the most employment losses.” In March 2023, research by Meire, Elliott, and Strobi calculated an average wildfire season yearly production loss of €13 to €21 billion across Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece.
Back in August 2023, Euronews reported on losses in the tourism industry and quoted Tim Hentschel, CEO of the digital booking platform HotelPlanner: “Record-setting temperatures in European countries such as Greece, Italy, and Spain are not scheduled to ease up as we enter August, so it might be considered a much safer option to opt for a stay in northern Europe.”
In a paper published in Bioresources, Abrham, Soukupova, and Prochazka called for “effective fire management and prevention strategies, including public awareness, sustainable tourism practices, and international cooperation, [which] are essential to mitigate the adverse effects of wildfires.”
The commitment to business as usual is understandable. Businesses seek to return to normal and to assume that the disaster will not recur, that it was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Climate change is here to stay; adapting to it is critical as we face weather extremes, droughts and storms, wildfires, and flooding.
In the Responsible Tourism Awards this year, one of the six categories is focused on businesses and destinations working to create more climate-change resilience in the travel and tourism sector. If you know of good practices in this area, we urgently need to share them.
