Scenario planning for sustainable tourism: an introduction

This paper introduces the development of scenario planning for sustainable tourism, from the 1970s to the present day. It outlines the links between scenario planning and forecasting, its role as a business-planning tool generally, and its use in tourism for destination planning and advocacy. The prominent role of models is shown and the evolution from the first generation of forecast-focused models of the 1980s to the new generation of complex, integrative, hierarchical, dynamic and even adaptive models of today is discussed. The paper introduces a series of new scenario planning papers that cover a range of subjects including theorising scenario analysis, counterfactual scenario planning, green economy support systems, climate change scenarios (for ski and coastal tourism), destination environmental footprint scenario tools and transition management as a tool for scenario building.