Redrawing the Map and the Calendar: A Systematic Review of Climate Change, Thermal Displacement and Seasonal Redistribution in Tourism, 2024–2026
Keywords:
climate change adaptation, tourism seasonality, thermal comfort, coolcation, snow reliability, coral bleaching, destination competitiveness, calendrical adaptationAbstract
Climate change is conventionally framed in tourism scholarship as an emissions problem for which the sector bears responsibility. Between 2024 and 2026 a second framing has become equally consequential, in which climate change acts on tourism as an exogenous force redistributing demand across space and across the calendar. The empirical record for the period is unambiguous. Europe recorded land-temperature anomalies of 2.56 to 2.71 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in 2025 and a Western European June anomaly of 3.06 degrees above the 1991 to 2020 baseline in 2026. Greece’s summer share of annual arrivals fell from fifty-six per cent in 2019 to fifty per cent in 2024 while shoulder-season overnight stays rose thirteen per cent. Satellite analysis of Alpine ski areas found declining snow coverage across ninety-four to 99.5 per cent of areas assessed. The Great Barrier Reef recorded its sixth mass bleaching since 2016 with regional coral cover declines of 13.9 to 30.6 per cent in a single monitoring year. This review synthesises thirty-three peer-reviewed studies published between 2024 and 2026 across five clusters: demand redistribution and destination competitiveness; thermal comfort and bioclimatic indices; snow reliability and winter tourism; coastal, island and reef exposure; and adaptation planning by destinations and firms. The review proposes the Climate Repositioning Matrix, which classifies destinations by exposure trajectory and adaptive capacity into four strategic positions, and introduces the construct of calendrical adaptation to distinguish temporal redistribution of demand from spatial substitution. The review finds that the phenomenon most discussed in industry, cool-climate substitution, is almost entirely unstudied in peer-reviewed work, and that adaptation research is dominated by hazard assessment rather than by evaluation of adaptation effectiveness. Seven propositions are advanced.
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