Climate-Related Resilience in an Alpine Tourism Destination: Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park

Abstract

Alpine national parks are among the most climate-sensitive tourism landscapes, and Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park exemplifies how rapidly changing biophysical conditions are reshaping the foundations of destination management in Aotearoa New Zealand. Accelerated glacier retreat, unstable hydrological regimes, and increasingly variable weather patterns are altering access, damaging infrastructure, and challenging long-held assumptions about the stability of iconic alpine environments. While these shifts are well documented in scientific and hazard-management reports, far less is known about how such pressures are interpreted within the policy and planning documents that guide tourism and conservation decision-making. This paper addresses that gap through a qualitative document analysis of management plans, climate reports, visitor strategy materials and monitoring outputs drawn from institutional sources from 2005 onwards, offering a more contextualised understanding of how resilience is currently framed. The findings reveal a protected-area system in transition. Environmental change is clearly recognised across technical reports, yet its implications for tourism operations, visitor experience and long-term planning are not always addressed consistently across the document set. The term “resilience” appears in parts of the documents analysed, but it is applied in different ways, including in relation to hazard and visitor-safety management, infrastructure maintenance, and broader adaptation planning. An integrated framing that links climate projections to destination-level planning is not consistently evident, suggesting scope for clearer alignment between long-term risk information and day-to-day management decisions. At the same time, the document record highlights opportunities for reimagining visitor engagement, strengthening interpretation, and aligning future planning more closely with mana whenua values and cultural responsibilities. By situating Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park within broader scholarship on climate-related destination resilience, this study contributes a grounded analysis of how institutional narratives shape adaptation pathways in non-ski alpine tourism settings. It underscores the need for more coordinated, forward-looking and culturally grounded approaches capable of responding to ongoing environmental change in one of New Zealand’s most iconic protected landscapes.