Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a wakeup call to the global tourism industry about the need to plan for large scale crisis events and generated a tidal wave of research papers on how both the supply side and demand side responded to the crisis. As the global tourism industry moves beyond the pandemic, it faces even more challenges from climate change and strategies adopted to combat climate change including transition to net zero. Grim news from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports over several decades have warned about rapid ecosystem loss, rising sea levels, heatwaves and extreme weather impacts. Many of these warnings have now moved from predictions to reality.  Surprisingly, the response from tourism, hospitality and leisure researchers has been muted. A recent paper by Peeters, Çakmak & Guiver  in 2024 found that only 6.5% of 2573 journal articles that featured ‘sustainable tourism’ in their title, abstract, or keywords looked at issues related to climate change mitigation. In the scientific literature we find the opposite, with a large number of cutting-edge research papers, special issues and the emergence of specialist journals that focus on climate related issues.

The aim of this special issue to begin to redress this concerning lack of interest in considering how climate change, and strategies to respond to climate change, will impact on the tourism industry. This special issue follows on from one of the first special issues in the tourism literature published a decade ago by the Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism research.

In considering the themes that could be examined in this special issue we first recognized the long-term impact of Climate change. Unlike past crisis events including COVID-19 that eventually end, the changes that emission of greenhouse gasses (GHG) has set in train changes that could potentially last for centuries and which at this point in time, are difficult if not impossible to predict with any degree of certainty. We do not know at what level GHG emissions will plateau and we do not know when that will happen. Recent research by Grant, Naish, Dunbar, Stocchi, Kominz, Kamp et al. published in Nature indicates when atmospheric concentrations were at current levels during the mid-Pliocene warm period about 3 million years ago global temperatures were up to 3⁰ C higher than now and sea levels up to 20 metres above present-day levels,

The threats posed to coastal areas including many of the world’s major cities and key ecosystems will have significant impacts on their future appeal as tourism hotspots. Similarly, policies to combat climate change including transition to net zero emissions, and potential adoption of new economic models such as the circular economy model, the Doughnut economy model proposed by Ranworth in 2017, the 2022 Bio-Cultural-Green (BCG) initiative proposed by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), degrowth and the green economy will have a profound impact on how the future tourism economy is structured, operates  and how it will be required to conform to policies to combat climate change.

Authors are invited to submit an abstract of up to 1,000 words, including title, keywords, research objectives and questions, and research method to the email address below. We invite submissions based on case studies, applied research, theory and model testing, review papers as well as theory testing.

All submitted abstracts will be initially reviewed for their suitability for the Special Issue. Once the abstracts are considered suitable for the special issue, the authors will be invited to submit a full manuscript with 6,000-10,000 words via Taylor & Francis Submission Portal. During the submission process, please state clearly that your manuscript is intended for publication consideration in the special issue.

Accepted papers will be posted online immediately with an immediate acceptance date and permanent DOI. They may be accessed and cited before the full special issue is finalized. It is our plan to have the full text of accepted papers published online in a special issue in 2025.

Please submit 1,000 words abstract on or before 31st January 2024 (Hong Kong Time, UTC +8) to [email protected].

Timeframe

• Abstract Submission Closing Date: 31st January 2024
• Abstract Reviews and Preliminary Decisions: by 8th March 2024
• Full Paper Submission Closing Date: 28th June 2024
• Expected Publication: Early 2025

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article