And now for the weather: info-seeking & climate change adaptation in Pacific tourism

Cli­mate change adapt­a­tion is increas­ingly talked about in the travel & tour­ism trade media as vital to the sus­tain­ab­il­ity of the sec­tor, espe­cially in regions sus­cept­ible to extreme weath­er events and the worst-case scen­ari­os of sea level rise, such as Pacific Island nations. In this “GT” Insight, Dr Johanna Nalau, Research Fel­low at the Grif­fith Insti­tute for Tour­ism and Grif­fith Cli­mate Change Response Pro­gram, Grif­fith Uni­ver­sity, Aus­tralia, explains the find­ings of her study of weath­er inform­a­tion-seek­ing among Fiji tour­ism oper­at­ors and what the pos­sible implic­a­tions are for cli­mate change adaptation.

Understanding differences in the info-seeking behaviour of tourism operators

In the Pacific Islands, long white sandy beaches with icon­ic sun­sets are often the main tour­ism attrac­tion. Oth­er attrac­tions include pristine envir­on­ments, cor­al reefs and mar­ine life. The same weath­er and cli­mate that enables the trop­ic­al envir­on­ments to flour­ish is how­ever also prone to cyc­lones and extreme events. The tour­ism industry bears often the brunt of adverse weath­er with decreased tour­ist arrivals and loss of busi­ness continuity.

Inform­a­tion clearly has a busi­ness value in that bet­ter inform­a­tion can help in mak­ing timely and even foresight­ful decisions on when to close down an oper­a­tion and how to plan for expec­ted busi­ness dis­rup­tions. As in our mod­ern age most inform­a­tion is avail­able through dif­fer­ent kinds of media (TV, radio, inter­net), one would expect people to be able to access inform­a­tion rel­at­ively eas­ily. Yet, often this is not the case. So what does impact on how tour­ism oper­at­ors seek information?

How people differ in seeking, accessing and using information

We were curi­ous about the factors that could explain dif­fer­ences in access­ing, seek­ing and using weath­er and cli­mate inform­a­tion among tour­ism oper­at­ors in Fiji. We con­duc­ted a social sci­ence study in towns of Nadi and Suva in Fiji with both large and small tour­ism oper­at­ors, and oth­er tour­ism stake­hold­ers. What we found was fas­cin­at­ing: people differed greatly in how they access weath­er inform­a­tion, who they trus­ted the most as a rel­ev­ant source, and why they needed weath­er and cli­mate inform­a­tion in the first place.

In our ana­lys­is three dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent groups emerged, which held in com­mon par­tic­u­lar factors for their behaviour:

Independent information seekers

The first group, “Inde­pend­ent Inform­a­tion Seekers” were indi­vidu­als with high pos­i­tions of respons­ib­il­ity in the organ­isa­tion, and always with long-term exper­i­ence with weath­er pro­fes­sion­ally. These indi­vidu­als felt very com­fort­able in inter­pret­ing weath­er phe­nomen­on by them­selves, and they had often mul­tiple web­sites and apps run­ning at the same time on their com­puters and phones. For this group, it was very import­ant to be on top of the situ­ation, and dis­trib­ute their ana­lys­is also to oth­ers who were depend­ent on their decisions for example regard­ing the evac­u­ation of marinas.

Mediator-dependent information seekers

The second group, “Medi­at­or Depend­ent Seekers”, were often man­agers who did not know neces­sar­ily which sites to go to and where to get the best inform­a­tion. They could some­times call their rel­at­ives back in Aus­tralia or New Zea­l­and and ask for weath­er updates as the Aus­trali­an and New Zea­l­and weath­er inform­a­tion seemed more accur­ate. This group of man­agers did not have high level of inform­a­tion lit­er­acy skills (how to nav­ig­ate sites in the inter­net or which apps to down­load and use on their phone). This group was more com­fort­able in being informed by anoth­er per­son whom they trusted.

Observation-based information seekers

The third group, “Obser­va­tion Seekers”, were more focused on observing the weath­er either based on their past exper­i­ence of the place or by tra­di­tion­al know­ledge signs that they had been taught in their com­munity. The indi­gen­ous Fiji­ans did not rely on usu­al media (TV, radio, inter­net) but, for example, read star form­a­tions and the way clouds were mov­ing. Often this kind of know­ledge is held with­in com­munit­ies and people col­lect­ively dis­cuss what par­tic­u­lar signs might mean and then inter­pret the weather.

The kind of information in use

The oper­at­ors used weath­er inform­a­tion daily, for the most part, depend­ing on the nature of their oper­a­tions. The act­ive inform­a­tion seekers used a broad­er vari­ety of inform­a­tion, where­as the medi­at­or-depend­ent seekers mostly used TV, radio and offi­cial channels.

We also found that although many oper­at­ors did not use longer-term cli­mate inform­a­tion, many oper­at­ors would wel­come bet­ter and more con­sist­ent inform­a­tion at a sea­son­al scale so that they could do some for­ward plan­ning. For example, it could be help­ful to know the tim­ing of rain peri­ods for next busi­ness year and wheth­er there are poten­tially drier and hot­ter peri­ods in the next two-three years. If there is a marked increase in extreme events, such as cyc­lones, then bet­ter pre­dic­tions could encour­age activ­it­ies such as cyc­lone-proof­ing tour­ism infrastructure.

Engaging the tourism sector in information use and access

So what does all this mean for the tour­ism sec­tor and people’s plan­ning and decision-mak­ing? One take-away mes­sage clearly is that if we want to sup­port the sec­tor and provide ‘use­ful’ inform­a­tion about weath­er and cli­mate, we need to first under­stand the audi­ence. If we do not know how people access weath­er inform­a­tion, extreme weath­er alerts, and why they trust par­tic­u­lar sources, it is dif­fi­cult to be heard. In many cases this may not mat­ter, but there are situ­ations in which timely and accur­ate inform­a­tion is life- (and busi­ness-) saving.

In Fiji, the exist­ing rela­tion­ships between the Fiji Hotel Asso­ci­ation, Fiji Met­eor­o­lo­gic­al Ser­vices, NaD­raki Weath­er Ser­vice, and the many oper­at­ors could be enhanced to provide tailored train­ing that responds spe­cific­ally to the need of the tour­ism sec­tor. This could even start from dis­cus­sions around inform­a­tion lit­er­acy, pro­mo­tion and aware­ness of access­ible inform­a­tion and its interpretation.

Fea­tured image: Pacific Ocean, Feb­ru­ary 1, 2016. Four named trop­ic­al cyc­lones exist­ing sim­ul­tan­eously in Joint Typhoon Warn­ing Cen­ter (JTWC)‘s area of respons­ib­il­ity. From left to right: Trop­ic­al Cyc­lone Olwyn, Trop­ic­al Cyc­lone Nath­an, Trop­ic­al Storm Bavi, Trop­ic­al Cyc­lone Pam. Source: US Navy via CHIPS.

About the author

Dr Johanna Nalau is a Research Fel­low at Grif­fith Uni­ver­sity in Aus­tralia (Grif­fith Cli­mate Change Response Pro­gram (GCCRP) and Grif­fith Insti­tute for Tour­ism (GIFT)). She is pas­sion­ate about broad­en­ing our under­stand­ing of how people make decisions about cli­mate change adapt­a­tion and what inform­a­tion is most effect­ive in that pro­cess, includ­ing the tour­ism sector.

Dr Nalau’s research is very focused on two things: the­ory and stake­hold­ers in the real world. She has a keen interest in explor­ing this per­sist­ent gap between what we know in the­ory about adapt­a­tion and what we actu­ally do about it, and has explored this top­ic from a social sci­ence per­spect­ive in Aus­tralia, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Zan­zib­ar (Tan­zania), Fiji and, most recently, Samoa.