Is the tourism perspective envisaged in climate change adaptation planning? Evaluating the road map of political, social and environmental dimension in Spanish destinations

Climate change is one of the main challenges for today’s society due to the increase of extreme event frequency and severity, demanding policy actions and coordination to mitigate their impacts. This contribution analyzes to what extent tourism activity is considered in the Spanish National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change 2021–2030 (PNACC) and the local strategies, which measures are considered to reinforce the tourism industry adaptive capacity, and how coherent tourist cities’ plans for climate change adaptation are. To this end, the following research questions are posed: (1) What actions are promoted, and how do they aim to face climate change? (2) Is the type of tourist destination a driving factor conditioning actions design? (3) What is the balance between public and private responsibilities and actions when reducing the tourism industry’s vulnerability? We evaluate the top-ten Spanish tourist cities by applying the triple-loop approach to delve into the political, social, and environmental dimensions of climate change adaptation together with testing policy coherence standards. The findings reported that most plans are framed in a multi-focal adaptation strategy, in which the focus on the tourism industry can be explicit or implicit while distinguishing between actions carried out by tourist cities and cities with tourists. Interestingly, bottom-up approaches are promoted to collect citizens’ perspectives regarding climate change, sometimes including tourists as end-users. Furthermore, the policy coherence test pointed out the need to strengthen the attention to tourism-related measures and a more pro-active engagement of the tourism industry to motivate accurate and robust actions in the medium and long terms.