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In July 2023, as wildfires raged across Greece, tourists scrambled for safety. In some cases, rescue teams rescued tourists trapped on beaches by boat. On the island of Rhodes alone, fires forced the evacuation of around 19,000 people, the largest evacuation in the country’s history.
The disaster hit local residents hard as well, but the fire dealt them a double blow: it took away part of their economy along with the fleeing tourists.
As the world’s fastest warming continent, Europe faces a range of climate threats, from devastating floods to extreme heat waves and wildfires. Climate change threatens to upend tourism across the continent, as well as the economies of many countries. For a country like Greece, where tourism accounts for roughly one-fifth of its GDP, another year of wildfires could be devastating.
To understand how vulnerable European destinations are to extreme weather, a team of Italian researchers analyzed more than 110,000 tourist attractions across Europe. They created maps of tourist attractions like restaurants, hotels, and museums, and combined the maps with extreme weather risk data like floods, storms, and heatstroke.
The study found that big cities and coastal tourist destinations such as Rome in Italy, Seville in Spain and Copenhagen in Denmark are most at risk. These locations are densely populated with tourist attractions and often in dangerous geographic locations that make them vulnerable to high temperatures, strong winds and swollen rivers.
A new study maps the exposure of European destinations to extreme weather events. The top left shows the density of destinations such as hotels, museums and restaurants, while the top right, bottom left and bottom right show the density of destinations affected by flooding, heatstroke and windstorms, respectively. The graph is from Camatti et al.
More heatwaves will hit popular coastal destinations such as Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and southwestern France, while severe storms will batter coastlines, particularly in northwestern Europe and the UK. Flooding is also expected to increase across the continent, with France, Italy and the UK predicted to be the worst.
Researchers say the extreme weather will have a long-term economic impact on local residents: the cost of repairing weather damage, reduced tourism and tarnished image will slow what has been an economic engine for many countries.
The researchers hope that the map and dataset can help guide climate adaptation strategies, make the tourism industry more resilient, and inform emergency response planning — any strategies are unlikely to work with another year of extreme heat predicted for popular European destinations.
