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The polar regions are increasingly at the center of attention as the hot spots of climate crisis as well as tourism development. The recent IPCC reports highlight several climate change risks for the rather carbon-intensive and weather-based/dependent polar tourism industry in the Arctic and the Antarctic. This study presents the scholarly state-of-knowledge on tourism and climate change in the polar regions with a literature survey extending beyond the Anglophone publications. As a supporting tool, we provide a live web GIS application based on the geographical coverages of the publications and filterable by various spatial, thematic and bibliographical attributes. The final list of 137 publications indicates that, regionally, the Arctic has been covered more than the Antarctic, whilst an uneven distribution within the Arctic also exists. In terms of the climate change risks themes, climate risk research, i.e. impact and adaptation studies, strongly outnumbers the carbon risk studies especially in the Arctic context, and, despite a balance between the two main risk themes, climate risk research in the Antarctic proves itself outdated. Accordingly, the review ends with a research agenda based on these spatial and thematic gaps and their detailed breakdowns.

The range of Arctic tourism supply is continuously increasing with a variety of tourism products on offer. However, climate change is becoming a more prominent issue threatening the operations of tourism businesses and the livelihood of some tourism actors, such as dogsledders. This article aims to fill the descriptive research gap that exists regarding the dependency on the physical environment, climate, and weather for dogsledding activities. This is achieved by studying how climate change may threaten possible climate and weather thresholds for these activities, and how climate change may affect the future opportunities for dogsledding in northern Sweden. The study is based on interviews with dogsledders in Arctic Sweden and climate projections from the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI). The results demonstrate the following thresholds for dogsledding activities: (1) dogsledding requires 10–20 cm of packed snow and/or solid ice on bodies of water, (2) above 15 °C is too hot for dogs to pull (wheeled) sledges, (3) cold weather thresholds are determined by visitors’ preferences and are not considered a problem for dogsledders or dogs, and (4) rain can cancel tours for all dogsledders, and strong wind can cancel tours for dogsledders located in the mountain regions. Finally, extreme events such as heatwaves, storms, thunderstorms, forest fires, heavy rain, floods, and more rapid weather changes have already affected some dogsledders. These necessary thresholds for dogsledding activities could already be jeopardized for the southern and coastal locations of Arctic Sweden. In addition, the climate projections from SMHI show that warmer days and more precipitation in the form of rain will become more common in the future, especially in the absence of global mitigation measures. However, further research on vulnerability/resilience and adaption strategies for dogsledding activities is necessary to truly understand the impact of climate change.

The report presents findings from a workshop where researchers, students, tourism industry representatives, policy makers and entrepreneurs from the Arctic discussed the challenges of overtourism, the impact of COVID-19 and visions for restarting tourism. A key for sustainable management of tourism is that actors are aware that they are part of a wide ranging tourism system that affects how they can tackle ensuing crisis or challenges such as overtourism and undertourism. The COVID-19 hit tourism hard across the Arctic although there are also regional differences. The pandemic revealed the vulnerability of the tourism product and opened a space for reconsidering tourism growth and the negative impacts of tourism on climate, biodiversity and communities. The report argues for the need to build tourism based on tourism-community collaboration.

The European North has long attracted travelers, the selling point often being the availability of nature and wilderness. Recent developments, however, suggest a greater variety of tourism motivations, including new products such as dogsled tours, aurora borealis watching, snowmobiling, and stays at ice hotels. Many of these firms use names containing the term ‘Arctic' or similar terminology related to imaginations of the Far North. The chosen terminology is considered one example of the process of ‘Arctification'. However, there is a limitation in descriptive knowledge about the overall Arctification of the region’s tourism industry. Hence, this article aims to illustrate the Arctification of the tourism industry by mapping the changing geographies of firm names. Through its results, the study aims to contribute an understanding of how firm naming is part of the tourism production, and how this influences the reimaging and delineation of regions. The study uses a descriptive quantitative approach, extracting data from the Retriever Business database. The results show a clear development of tourism firms increasingly using Arctic terminology in their firm names. Also, the tourism firms’ locations show patterns of spatial differences related to the region’s natural environment, population density, infrastructure, and the firms’ age.