The Zurich Mandala Climate Risk Index 2024 — The impact of climate change on the Australian tourism industry

This joint Zurich-Mandala report represents Australia’s first Climate Risk Index for the national tourism sector.

It utilises Zurich’s global capability to analyse the impact of climate change on Australia’s top tourism sites including major airports, national parks, beaches and museums.

It finds that:

• Currently, half of Australia’s tourism assets are in an elevated risk category, facing considerable climate & natural peril risk
• This is set to rise to between 55% and 68% of Australian tourism sites by 2050 under either an intermediate (two degrees Celsius of warming by 2041-2060) or extreme (three degrees) IPCC future climate scenario respectively
• Under the more extreme scenario, 80% of tourism sites will experience an increase in risk between 2025 and 2050.

In terms of economic impact, around 30% (up to 176,000) of jobs nationally could be jeopardised — 65% of which are outside our capital cities — in the event of a disaster scenario similar to that experienced following the bushfires of 2019-20. 

Read the full report