Destination Risk Scan: A Scalable Framework for Quantifying Climate Risk and Resilience in Tourism Destinations

Tourism destinations are increasingly exposed to climate-related hazards, yet robust, comparable, and decision-relevant assessments of destination resilience remain scarce. This contribution presents a hybrid quantitative–qualitative framework developed through the Destination Risk Scan project, which aims to systematically assess climate risk and resilience for tourism destinations at global and local scales. The approach integrates high-resolution climate hazard modelling, tourism-specific exposure analysis, and structured vulnerability and readiness indicators, complemented by participatory validation through destination-level stakeholder engagement in six pilot destinations.

At the core of the quantitative framework is the Global Tourism Climate Exposure Layer (G-TCEL) (Daniell et al., 2026 and Schäfer et al., 2026), a novel global dataset that measures how climate hazards intersect with tourism-relevant exposure. G-TCEL combines downscaled CMIP6 climate projections with tourism asset density and destination typologies (Urban, Coastal, Mountain, and Nature-based) to produce tourism-specific climate hazard exposure scores at sub-national (ADMIN-1) scale. Unlike generic hazard indices, G-TCEL captures where climate extremes matter most for tourism, providing a globally consistent, forward-looking exposure metric under multiple future emissions scenarios. While G-TCEL does not constitute a full vulnerability or resilience assessment, it establishes the essential hazard–exposure foundation upon which destination risk can be evaluated.

To move from exposure toward resilience, the framework integrates host-country climate vulnerability and adaptation readiness indicators, drawing on and extending established concepts of sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and readiness. These indicators capture how national-level physical and transition risks—such as infrastructure stability, water stress, health impacts, energy transitions, and governance capacity—shape the enabling conditions under which destinations can respond to climate change. The combined framework therefore reflects both destination-specific exposure patterns and the broader socio-economic context in which tourism adaptation occurs. The methodology allows for flexible aggregation of destination-level and host-country indicators, enabling sensitivity testing of different formulations that reflect alternative assumptions about how local exposure interacts with national resilience. This flexibility supports exploratory analysis and transparent communication of uncertainty, rather than prescribing a single deterministic risk score.

Crucially, the quantitative assessment is complemented by a qualitative validation component implemented through structured pilot workshops in six tourism destinations, which include the Canary Islands, Cook Island, Queenstown, Koh Samui, Dolomites and Colorado. These pilots engage destination stakeholders—including destination management organisations, local authorities, and tourism operators—to ground-truth model outputs, assess relevance for decision-making, and identify locally specific drivers of sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and readiness that are not captured in global datasets. In selected pilots, sufficient local data captured through qualitative scorecard assessments and qunatiative indicators allow the full implementation of a destination-level resilience assessment, demonstrating how global screening can be refined into actionable local insights. By combining globally consistent quantitative risk screening with participatory, place-based validation, the Destination Risk Scan offers a scalable yet context-sensitive approach to understanding and enhancing tourism destination resilience. The framework supports benchmarking, prioritization, and dialogue, contributing to more robust climate-informed decision-making in the tourism sector.