Abstract ID: 3.9547 | Accepted as Talk | Poster | TBA | TBA

The aim of our presentation is to examine the strategies carried out by stakeholders to adapt – or not – to the effects of climate change on nature-based tourism area, using the example of the Canigó massif, an iconic location of the Pyrénées-Orientales administrative department. This mountain range lies halfway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Catalan Pyrenees and is particularly impacted by climate change. In addition to tourists, the area also attracts a large number of day-trippers from various localities. We wonder to what extent climate change is changing recreational activities in the massif. Our main hypothesis is that climate change tends to modify twice the socio-economic activities linked to tourism and day-tripping. This means that local stakeholders, who depend to a large extent on recreation activities, are facing (and will face all the more) both a change in their practices due to the effects of climate change (direct impact), and a change in tourist demand (indirect impact) due to the extreme heat on the Catalan coast. Climate models indicate that the phenomena currently observed will become more pronounced in the future (IPCC, 2023). Therefore, we planned to present stakeholders prospective scenarios (Ghosh, 2015 ; Mermet, 2002) to confront them with probable situations of change, based on IPCC forecasts and pre-existing data. Other major works have, for example, studied the adaptation of mountain users (Salim, 2023 ; Rutty, 2015), the transition of ski resorts (Bonnemain, Claeys, 2023 ; Hatt, Claeys, 2024) or the adaptation/ mitigation of the tourism sector in summer (Probstl-Haider, 2021) and in winter (Steiger, 2021) but very few works have focused on the adaptations of the socio-economic stakeholders in mountain areas without mountain resorts and especially with a prospective method. This work will provide an opportunity to question the levers for action of the stakeholders and more generally the sustainability of current activities. This presentation will show the construction of these scenarios and the initial results. It will also demonstrate how the prospective method fits into a wider study of how climate change affects recreational use.