Journal of Climate Change, Disaster Risk and Resilience Studies
Tourism and Climate Change Scholarship: Insights from an African Journal
Abstract
Chigozie Jude ODUM and Hermann Kimo Boukamba
The tourism value chain contributes to climate change (CC), while CC impacts the tourism sector, including nature based destinations, with many regions relying on their environment to attract tourists, such as in Africa. Therefore, there is a need to understand tourism and CC in Africa through the literature, but such scholarship appears to be scarce. Moreover, existing studies are skewed to the global north. However, the study is invaluable to tourism stakeholders in Africa and beyond, as CC is a current issue that requires attention from different disciplines. The study adopted a documentary approach to search for studies in Africa, via a Scopus-indexed African-based tourism journal. A total of 1, 298 (N) studies within a given period were screened, of which 11 articles (0.85%) were within the scope of the study. The results indicated that tourism and CC research is limited (0.85% of N) in Africa; existing ones are geographically concentrated in South Africa (SA). Secondly, due to the few journal articles, existing studies adopt more of a documentary method (72.7%), while other methods have 9.1%. The implications of these results were discussed. Nevertheless, the study relied on a single journal; this makes generalization of findings difficult, but its contributions to CC and tourism discourse is germane and relevant to CC and tourism stakeholders.