27/08/2023
Act. a las 11:05
CEST
An extensive study by the EU reveals that Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria will gain holidaymakers due to their milder climate
He turismoone of the great economic engines of Spain, will suffer major convulsions due to climate change. Loss of well-being in some regions due to extreme heat will cause thousands of tourists to be lost in areas such as the Balearic Islands, the Region of Murcia or the Valencian Community. Vacationers, as heat waves become more frequent, will directly flee from these destinations, hitherto leaders in the sector. On the other hand, communities with more benign temperatures, such as Galicia or Asturias, will gain prominence and reap the tourism that the others lose.
These are the conclusions of an analysis carried out by a group of scientists from the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Union. In their report, entitled ‘Regional impact of climate change on European tourist demand’, they detail how visits to different destinations can evolve depending on the level of warming that will be reached.
The ‘winners’ of the climate disaster
As a consequence of climate change in Spain, there will be winners and losers. The regions that benefited most from the increase in overnight stays are Cantabria, Asturias and Galicia. The tourist demand would increase up to a 7.2%, 4.2% and 3.2% respectively in these communities. They will be the great beneficiaries of this global disaster.
Galicia | JRC Asturias | JRC
The analysis of this group of experts has made their estimates based on four different scenarios, depending on the degree of warming, and assumptions are made for increases of the global temperature of 1.5 degrees more with respect to the pre-industrial era, 2 degrees, and also with 3 and up to 4 degrees of thermal rise. In the case of Galicia, the increase in tourist demand would go growing upfrom 0.5%, going through 1.2%, 2.5% and up to 3.2%, respectively, depending on these four scenarios, and these increases would be parallel to the loss of visitors in other areas of Spain.
Instead, another eight Spanish autonomies will suffer reductions in overnight stays in general, in any of the four climatic scenarios analyzed. These are precisely the most popular destinations in Spain today. The Balearic Islands, for example, would lose up to 8.16% of overnight stays if 4 degrees of warming are reached compared to the pre-industrial era (the objective set in the Paris Agreement is not to exceed 2º).
Meanwhile, the reduction in Murcia would be 6.8% and 3.2% in the Valencian Community. For this analysis, the JRC experts take 2019 tourism data as a base, which is similar to the current one after several years of impact from the pandemic in the sector. That is to say, the most affected are the three mentioned (Balearic Islands, Murcia and the Valencian Community) in addition to Extremadura, Andalusia, Community of Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha and Catalonia. And at the level of southern Europe, in addition, Spain, Cyprus, Greece and Portugal are the ones that will lose the most visitors.
Balearic Islands | JRC Valencian community | JRC Murcia | JRC
Before, the south; now the north
“There are more and more people who used to spend their summers in the south and now prefer Galicia”, explained this summer the president of the Tourism Cluster, Cesáreo Pardal, to El Faro de Vigo. “We notice a pull in the influx of visitors for this reason,” he warns. And it is not a one-off phenomenon. As he explains, last year the arrival of vacationers who came to the Galician community to escape the extreme heat began to be appreciated. “Word of mouth works,” he says.
Other recent reports, such as that of the Spanish Office for Climate Change, predict that in the last third of the current century and in a global warming scenario of 4 degrees Celsius, the desert and semi-arid climate occupies the eastern half of the Peninsula, while the Mediterranean climate will expand to the north until it covers most of the Cantabrian coast, so that all of Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and Vizcaya will have Mediterranean characteristics.
The north, a new tourist destination in summer | pxhere
The tenured professor of Earth Physics and researcher of the EPhysLab group at the University of Vigo, Juan Antonio Añel, is aware of North American companies that insure vacation time: “You take out insurance with which they guarantee that during the vacation period It’s going to be sunny, rainy, snowy… or whatever you want to hire. If you arrive and it fails, they give you your money back, ”he explained to the same newspaper. “From the point of view of climate and meteorological services, this new line of business already exists,” the Galician climate change expert qualifies.
Forecasts from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) show that the increase in temperatures by 1.5ºC will be a reality in almost a decade, despite the fact that the global objectives were for this increase to be achieved until the end of the century. In fact, currently the planet has already reached a 1.2ºC increase in global temperature compared to the pre-industrial era.
However, there are areas of the planet, such as Europe and especially the Mediterranean that have already reached a 2ºC increase, since they are the areas of the planet most affected by warming after the Arctic.
Reference study:
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Contact of the Environment section: [email protected]
2023-08-27 09:27:50
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