By Ben Lynam, Head of Communications & Research, The Travel Foundation

I’m writing this in between heatwaves, following the hottest June on record in England and much of Europe, with mainland Portugal reaching 46.6 °C and parts of Norway within the Arctic Circle reaching 32.5°C.

After an exceptionally dry May, wildfires erupted in tourist hotspots - from Crete to southern France and Izmir in Turkey - forcing airport closures, evacuation orders, flight cancellations, and government travel advisories. The Eiffel Tower shut its top deck due to extreme heat, and Paris transport networks warned of delays as railway tracks buckled. We saw headlines that are now all-too familiar, such as “Is it safe to travel or should I cancel my holiday?”

All this before the summer season has even properly begun.

For destination leaders around the world, what does this mean? Extreme weather events are something we need to get used to. Last year was the hottest ever recorded, and the past ten years all make up the Top Ten, in “an extraordinary streak of record-breaking temperatures”. But extraordinary is now ordinary. Weather is frequently disrupting travel flows, damaging infrastructure, straining local services, and imposing downtime and crisis responses during crucial months of the year. It’s time to stop treating extreme weather as an outlier and start designing for it as a feature of the system.

Given how unusually weather-sensitive tourism is, destinations should be on the front foot, understanding their specific risks, building resilience, and planning around disruption. Although visitor experience is part of the issue, climate risk affects all aspects of the tourism model: demand, supply and operations, as follows:

• Demand volatility – adapting to shifts in seasonality, shorter booking windows, and more cancellations. 
• Supply/asset degradation – identifying the natural, built and cultural features that draw visitors and are under threat. This goes to the core of place identity and brand promise: can you deliver the powdery snow, sandy beaches, or rainbow coral reefs? A current example is parts of the Caribbean experiencing record amounts of sargassum on the coastline.
• Operational disruption. Flooded roads, melting runways, cancelled flights, workforce exposure to heat — all affect day-to-day viability. This isn’t just about customer experience, it’s a growing cost to business.

Who’s showing leadership?

London Climate Action Week in June offered a glimpse of the kind of leadership needed for destination resilience. At an event hosted by Howden, the insurance company, we heard about the challenge of insurability in a changing climate, and how some companies are treating ecosystem health not just as a sustainability goal, but as a core strategy for risk management and climate resilience. Gloria Fluxà Thienemann from Iberostar declared climate change its number one risk (and this is true of most other hotel brands, whether or not they’ve recognised it yet).  Around 80% of Iberostar’s properties are located in exposed areas such as beachfronts, and it sees the case - as set out in its Wave of Change initiative - for investing in projects that reduce vulnerability. This includes restoring coral reefs, mangroves, sand dunes, and seagrass near its coastal hotels. It is based on the understanding that the cost of acting now is far lower than the cost of inaction, and can provide RoI in terms of reduced damage to properties, reduced downtime, lower insurance premiums, and enhanced brand affinity.

Also during London Climate Action Week, at a Travel Foundation event, we heard from the Canary Islands about their regenerative tourism strategy. Climate adaptation is a key element of this, with a shift from simply reducing tourism’s negative impacts to actively restoring natural systems. The plan focuses on three areas. First, it aims to unlock green investment and support upgrades to hotels and infrastructure to better cope with climate risks. Second, it looks at how tourist areas are designed, with the goal of reducing pressure on fragile coastlines and allowing nature to play its protective role. Third, it makes ecosystem restoration a central part of tourism planning, with active efforts to restore dunes, wetlands, and native vegetation to strengthen natural defences. The Canary Islands is one of the six pilot destinations participating in the Travel Foundation’s climate risk research (a collaboration with the CELTH group of Dutch universities, and Risklayer GmbH), recognising that destination managers need to become adept at understanding risk in order to prioritise what matters.

For Destination Management Organisations and National Tourism Administrations, this means rethinking what leadership looks like. Not just promoting the destination, but preparing it. Not just attracting more visitors, but building systems that can support them sustainably.

Climate change heightens the importance of risk for destinations, and requires us to focus more than ever on the needs of their communities and natural environments. It is therefore also an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how we develop and manage tourism itself. As such, the Travel Foundation has set out four big ideas, or “systems change enablers”, to catalyse tourism’s climate transition as part of its “Where next?” campaign:

1. A global climate risk register for destinations

A shared, open-access platform with localised climate risk profiles, so that destinations, investors, and tourism businesses can make better decisions, faster. This is about transparency, accountability, and smarter governance. It also means unlocking the urgency and investment required to respond meaningfully and equitably.

2. Equity as a standard in tourism planning

We need to hardwire community needs into the very DNA of tourism development: community-led planning, local procurement, revenue redistribution, and equity-linked KPIs. In practice, community support should be a condition of tourism development, something that happens with the community, not to the community.

3. A climate justice fund for frontline destinations

Those least responsible for emissions are already paying the highest price. This calls for a global fund to support climate adaptation in tourism-dependent destinations, with decisions made by the communities themselves. Tourism should align with other climate finance models, shifting responsibility onto those who’ve contributed most to the problem and done the least to address it.

4. Phasing out harmful tourism models and investing in better options

Let’s be honest: short-haul, high-emission breaks and overcrowded hotspots that place a heavy burden on local resources aren’t sustainable. So why are we still protecting and promoting these models? It’s time for tourism’s just transition — supporting workers, regenerating places, and redirecting investment toward low-carbon, community-owned alternatives.

These ideas aren’t abstract. They’re actionable. And the Travel Foundation is building the coalitions to deliver them, so that by the COP30 UN Climate Conference in November we can set out a clear timeline to bring them to life. In the meantime, we’re seeking feedback on these four ideas and the practical steps they require – and we are inviting everyone to join the conversation.

Adaptation and risk are, of course, a discussion about how to avoid bad things happening or at least bounce back from them quickly. But they can also be a discussion about new possibilities and opportunity. We need to change how we do tourism, so why not choose to do it even better?