Title: Tourism adaptation to climate change - analysing the policy environment of Fiji

Authors: Min Jiang; Emma Wong; Louise Munk Klint; Terry DeLacy; Dale Dominey-Howes

Addresses: Centre for Tourism and Services Research, School of International Business, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC 8001, Australia ' School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK ' Centre for Tourism and Services Research, School of International Business, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC 8001, Australia ' Centre for Tourism and Services Research, School of International Business, Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC 8001, Australia ' Australia-Pacific Tsunami Research Centre and Natural Hazards Research Laboratory, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

Abstract: As the largest export sector and a major employer for Fiji, tourism is probably highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to the sector's dependence on environment and climate. This paper evaluates the conduciveness of Fiji's policy environment for tourism adaptation to climate change. It analyses how Fiji's policies (both explicit and implicit) in climate change, tourism, environmental and disaster management address tourism adaptation types as well as characteristics of Small Island Developing States and Territories (SIDST) that make them especially vulnerable to climate change. The paper concludes that Fiji does provide a reasonably conducive policy environment for its tourism to adapt, but some important adaptation issues still remain as policy gaps. The Fijian government shows an intention to integrate climate change into sectoral policies, but it is yet to be mainstreamed into the tourism sector. Most of the initiatives are policy-level adaptation with research and education the second adaptation type relatively well addressed. Other aspects of adaptation, particularly technical, business management and behavioural adaptations, need to be more comprehensively addressed in Fiji. Based on these identified policy gaps, the paper recommends that the tourism sector in Fiji needs to deal with challenges in raising awareness of climate change issues, building financial and human resources capacities and ensuring policy implementation.

Keywords: tourism adaptation; climate change; policy environment; Fiji; small islands; disaster management; environmental management; tourism policy; human resources capacity; financial capacity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTP.2012.049722

International Journal of Tourism Policy, 2012 Vol.4 No.3, pp.238 - 260

Received: 01 Jun 2011
Accepted: 25 Jun 2012
Published online: 14 Nov 2014 *

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