The Covid-19 pandemic served as a wakeup call for the tourism industry, which was thought to be economically stable and secure. Many tourism destinations in the Alpine region have still not fully recovered from the challenges posed by the travel and contact restrictions and the associated loss of tourism revenue. However, the pandemic was only one of many crises that will continue to affect tourism in the future. Climate change in particular can be expected to shape alpine tourism.

The Resilient Tourism project, funded by Interreg Bavaria-Austria, follows the core objectives of raising awareness of the need for a resilient tourism industry and providing support in developing resilience at the individual, organizational, and destination levels. The project focuses on the regions of Upper Bavaria, Tyrol and Salzburg, thus covering a large part of the Alpine region.

Within this project, the team of researchers developed a resilience index, a benchmarking tool which provides information on the resilience of tourism destinations and allows the comparison among regions. The index covers economic, societal and ecological indicators for regional resilience, collected through a combination of literature analysis and internal workshops among the researchers.

Climate change can be expected to affect the ecological sphere the most, and our goal is to introduce this subindex and reflect on its pertinence to touristic regions. We present the subindex, which consists of five indicators, and support this presentation through the example of one of the project regions. We also critically reflect on the need for a holistic understanding of ecological resilience in alpine regions and discuss the limitations of such an index against the background of data availability. The presentation concludes with perspectives for future research regarding the ecological resilience of mountainous regions.