Threshold-governed dynamics of tourism vulnerability and resilience under climate extremes and economic development

Climate change is generating increasingly complex risks for socio-economic systems through the interaction of climate extremes, development trajectories, and adaptive capacities. However, dominant vulnerability–resilience frameworks often assume that economic development monotonically reduces climate risk, thereby overlooking nonlinear and regime-dependent dynamics. This study adopts an interdisciplinary risk perspective to examine how tourism systems respond to complex climate risks shaped jointly by climate extremes and economic conditions. Focusing on western China as a climate-sensitive and economically heterogeneous region, we develop a threshold-governed tourism vulnerability–resilience framework that integrates climate exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and governance readiness. Using panel data from 13 regions over the period 2003–2023, we apply panel threshold regression models to identify regime shifts in tourism responses across different levels of climate risk and economic development. The results reveal pronounced nonlinear dynamics. Below a critical economic threshold, tourism systems exhibit high sensitivity to climate extremes, with exposure acting as a dominant constraint on tourism performance. Beyond this threshold, the functional role of exposure changes and becomes increasingly mediated by governance capacity and adaptive investment. Climate-risk thresholds further amplify these effects: under high-risk regimes, negative exposure impacts intensify sharply, while the marginal effectiveness of adaptive capacity increases significantly. These findings demonstrate that tourism vulnerability and resilience are governed by explicit thresholds rather than linear development pathways. By revealing regime-dependent risk mechanisms in a coupled human–environment system, this study advances interdisciplinary understanding of complex climate risks and provides insights for designing development-stage- and risk-specific adaptation strategies.