Robert Steiger

Robert Steiger is Associate Professor at the Department of Public Finance, University of Innsbruck. His research interests are in the field of sustainable tourism development, regional economics, behavioral economics (tourist behavior) and climate change impacts on tourism. He has worked on climate change and tourism for over 10 years and has contributed to the national Climate Change Assessments of Austria (APCC) and Switzerland (CH2014), the Special Report on Climate Change and Tourism (SR19) in Austria, and the Second Climate Change Assessments of Austria (AAR2). He is Co-Chair of the Climate, Tourism and Recreation Commission of the International Society of Biometeorology. He is also lead expert of the internationalTourism Panel on Climate Change (TPCC). Since 2023 he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism.

His major research interest is sustainable tourism development in mountain areas, climate change impact assessments and adaptation. He has worked with choice experiments, surveys, agent-based models and he has developed a physically-based ski season simulation model (SkiSim). With these methods, climate change risks of tourism markets and individual destinations can be assessed. Market-wide analyses were conducted for a number of relevant ski destinations in the world, including Austria, Switzerland, Southern Germany, Northern Italy, Scandinavia, Eastern North America (Canada & US) and China (see Publications). Despite regional differences, projections for most markets show that climate change will become a challenge for some destinations, while at the same time declining snow reliability might also bring opportunities for destinations with a more favorable climate. Therefore, climate change risk evaluations are important for a sustainable tourism development. With his research, he wants to improve the knowledge of climate change impacts on the tourism industry and to provide climate change risk analyses for tourism businesses and regions.