Dynamic Connectedness of Geopolitical, Energy, and Climate Risks in Tourism
This study utilizes the Diebold–Yilmaz framework to demonstrate that the dynamic connectedness between geopolitical, energy, and climate risks significantly drives tourism uncertainty, with interactions intensifying during crises and revealing climate policy uncertainty as a critical transmission channel.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Travel is one of the world's most vital industries, a massive engine that moves money and people across borders, supporting hundreds of millions of jobs. Yet, this industry lives on a knife's edge. It depends entirely on people feeling safe enough to leave home, on planes and ships running on time, and on the weather staying predictable. When the world feels unstable, travelers stay put, and the industry stalls. For decades, economists have known that fear of war, spikes in fuel prices, and confusion over climate rules can hurt tourism. But they have mostly looked at these problems one by one, as if a war, a fuel shortage, and a new climate law were separate events that hit the travel sector in isolation.
This separation misses a crucial reality: the modern world is deeply tangled. A conflict in one region can spike fuel prices, which delays ships, which changes how governments write climate laws, which in turn makes travelers nervous all over again. To understand how tourism really survives these shocks, researchers needed to stop looking at the pieces and start watching the whole machine. They needed to see how fear, fuel, and policy talk to each other in real time, and how those conversations change the mood of the travel industry.
In a new study, researchers from the University of South Africa set out to map these invisible connections. They gathered data from January 2005 to February 2025, tracking six different types of uncertainty that ripple through the global system. These included the risk of war and political tension, the uncertainty surrounding the cost and availability of fuel for transport, the confusion caused by shifting climate policies, the specific worries about the transition to a green economy, and finally, a direct measure of how uncertain the tourism industry itself feels. By feeding these six streams of information into a single computer model, the team could watch how a shock in one area would travel to the others, and how those relationships shifted from month to month.
The results reveal a system that is far more dynamic than previously thought. On average, the study found that these different risks are moderately connected, with about 27 percent of the uncertainty in the system coming from the way these factors influence one another. However, this average hides a dramatic truth: the connections are not constant. During times of calm, the links are loose. But when major crises hit, the system snaps together with terrifying speed. The researchers observed that during the Russia–Ukraine war and the subsequent disruptions to shipping in the Red Sea, the connectedness of the entire system surged to nearly 83 percent. In those moments, a shock in one corner of the world did not just travel to tourism; it locked the entire global risk network into a single, high-voltage circuit where every part reacted instantly to every other part.
One of the most surprising discoveries challenges the old way of thinking about tourism as a passive victim. For a long time, experts assumed that tourism simply sat on the receiving end, absorbing shocks from wars or fuel prices. The data shows something different. The study found that tourism uncertainty often acts as a sender, not just a receiver. When the travel industry gets nervous, that fear spreads outward, influencing how people think about climate policy and even geopolitical stability. It turns out that a crisis in tourism can be a leading signal, a warning shot that tells the rest of the world that something is wrong, rather than just a symptom of a problem that started elsewhere.
The study also uncovered a specific, powerful link that had been overlooked. While wars and fuel prices are obvious threats, the researchers found that uncertainty about climate policy has the strongest and most consistent connection to tourism uncertainty. As governments debate how to cut emissions and regulate carbon, the resulting confusion creates a direct line of tension that travels straight to the travel industry. This suggests that the future of tourism depends just as much on the clarity of climate laws as it does on the safety of borders.
Perhaps the most important lesson from the research is that the rules of the game change depending on the moment. The study explicitly rules out the idea that there is a single, steady relationship between risk and travel. The way a war affects tourism today is not the same as how it affected travel ten years ago. During the 2013 to 2015 period, geopolitical tensions were the main driver of travel fear. But by 2022, the focus had shifted, and the uncertainty surrounding energy and transport costs became the dominant force. The researchers found that the role of these risks flips back and forth; sometimes a factor is the source of the trouble, and other times it is just the one catching the fallout.
This finding has profound implications for how we prepare for the future. If tourism planners and investors rely on long-term averages, they will be blind to the moments when the system is most fragile. The study suggests that resilience requires a new kind of vigilance, one that watches for these sudden shifts in how risks connect. It is not enough to plan for a war or a fuel crisis in isolation; the industry must be ready for the moment when those crises fuse together, turning a moderate problem into a global emergency. By understanding that these risks are a living, breathing network that changes its shape with every crisis, the world can better protect the people and economies that depend on the freedom to travel.
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