ADAPT: Anticipating Antarctica’s Uncertain Tourism Futures
Tourism in Antarctica is growing and diversifying fast. The ADAPT project developed scenarios, adaptation pathways and signals of change to help public and private stakeholders make informed decisions about the future of tourism on the continent.
Project duration: 2022 – 2025
The challenge
Antarctic tourism takes place amid vulnerable nature and wilderness values protected by international agreements, and its growth brings a risk of increasing cumulative impacts.
This raises essential questions: what will Antarctic tourism look like in the future, what impact will it have, how can its values be protected, and who is responsible?
Our approach
Funded by NWO within the Polar Tourism research programme of the Dutch Research Agenda, ETFI and international partners used four scenario approaches: a baseline scenario, explorative scenarios, an aspirational scenario and risk-based scenarios. Together, these form the basis for understanding possible impacts and the actions needed to move towards a desirable future. The team included Stefan Hartman, Albert Postma and Jasper Heslinga (ETFI) and researchers from Australia, Canada, the UK and the Netherlands.
The impact
The project delivered a set of open-access scenario studies on Antarctic tourism in 2035, brought together in a synthesis report. They give governments, tour operators and researchers a shared picture of possible futures, as a basis for decisions that protect Antarctica’s values and maintain a social licence for tourism. The approach is also applicable to other protected areas.
Read the synthesis report: https://doi.org/10.48544/e88dc51f-a877-4f63-9138-6de98ccaf158
What could we discover together?
Whether you have a research question, a project idea or an interest in collaborating, we'd love to hear from you.
Contact our team!