Do disasters speak louder than hazard exposure? Tourism policy and ecosystem protection in coastal destinations

Tourism in tropical coastal regions depends fundamentally on healthy ecosystems, yet tourism policies often fail to acknowledge this social-ecological interdependence. While environmental and climate adaptation policies may address ecosystem protection, the tourism sector frequently overlooks ecosystem safeguards in its own policy frameworks. This sectoral disconnect raises a critical question: what drives tourism policymakers to articulate protection for the ecosystems their sector relies upon? Do they respond proactively to known hazard risks, or does disaster experience prompt greater policy attention to ecosystem protection? We investigated this question by analyzing 415 tourism policy documents from 123 tropical coastal countries across a 25-year period (2000-2025). We developed a Tourism Ecosystem Protection Index (TEPI) using natural language processing to quantify policy articulation across five dimensions: ecosystem recognition, site management, infrastructure safeguards, environmental integration, and climate awareness. We combined this index with hazard exposure data from the INFORM Risk Index and realized disaster impacts from the EM-DAT database to test competing hypotheses about policy development.

Our cross-sectional analysis found no significant relationship between hazard exposure and tourism policy articulation of ecosystem protection. Countries facing severe cyclone and flood risks showed no greater policy attention to ecosystems than lower-risk destinations. Awareness of risk, it appears, does not translate into sectoral policy articulation. However, a different pattern emerged when examining countries that experienced major disasters. Using a quasi-experimental design comparing disaster-affected nations  to matched controls, we found that disaster experience was associated with greater policy articulation of ecosystem protection. This effect was concentrated in ecosystem recognition and environmental integration components, suggesting disasters may prompt reframing of tourism-environment relationships rather than merely technical adjustments. We note this represents changes in policy articulation, not demonstrated implementation.

Over our study period, the cross-sectional relationship between hazard exposure and policy articulation strengthened, with rolling correlations shifting from weakly negative to weakly positive. Three sensitivity analyses examining Zika virus, oil price shocks, and the Paris Agreement produced patterns consistent with a hazard-specific rather than general crisis or global governance mechanism, though these supplementary tests have limited statistical power. These findings carry provisional implications for climate adaptation in coastal social-ecological systems. Tourism policy may develop ecosystem protection articulation through reactive rather than anticipatory pathways. Disasters appear to prompt policy attention that general hazard awareness does not, though whether such articulation translates to implementation remains an open question requiring future research with outcome indicators.