Strengthening Destinations’ Resilience from Bushfires—A Study of Eastern Australia

Climate change has brought people’s attention in recent decades, which demonstrates a critical phenomenon of increased natural disaster risks. The consequences of natural hazards are highly potential to bring significant economic, reputational, social, and environmental impacts on Australia’s tourism industry. Considering the close relationship between the unique natural environment and the local tourism industry, natural disasters always play critical roles in terms of the destinations’ resilience. This paper aims to examine the cause-and-effect of natural disaster resilience for the tourism industry in Eastern Australia with the particular concern of bushfire. Representative bushfire events will be studied to locate the industry’s preparedness and the existed action gaps mainly with the focus on government and destination management organizations, as well as discuss the disaster prevention implications, direct/indirect impacts and tourism-related issues. Also, a natural disaster resilience assessment framework for the industry will be developed with the key indicators from multiple aspects. A couple of future directions will be proposed regarding recovery methods, including the needs of destination image recovery, supportive policies for small businesses and cross-functional partnership.