Tunisia

Tunisia entered the second half of the 2020s in the strongest tourism position it has held since 2010, with arrivals surpassing 10 million in 2024 and crossing 11 million in 2025. Yet the model that produced these numbers — high-volume, beach-anchored, all-inclusive — is unlikely to survive the century in anything like its present form. By 2100, Tunisian tourism will have been reshaped by three forces operating on overlapping timescales: a Mediterranean climate warming roughly twenty percent faster than the global mean, an acute and tightening water scarcity that already places the country below the absolute-scarcity threshold, and an artificial-intelligence inflection whose effects on labour, value capture, and surveillance may prove at least as consequential as the physics of the coastline itself.

Start with the coast, because that is where today's tourism lives. The Sahel beach belt — Hammamet, Sousse, Port El Kantaoui, Mahdia, Monastir, and the Djerba–Zarzis axis — was built largely between the 1970s and 1990s on dune systems with poor sediment supply, and it sits squarely inside what is now the best-documented climate hotspot on Earth. Under a central planning trajectory, summer maxima rise sharply enough that July and August beach tourism becomes physiologically uncomfortable for a growing share of European visitors. Sea-level rise of fifty to seventy-five centimetres by century's end combines with intensifying storm surges, recurrent marine heatwaves in the Sicily Channel and Gulf of Gabès, and the aesthetic damage of jellyfish blooms, sea-grass loss, and fish kills already visible in 2023 through 2025. Some resort plots will be defended by hard engineering; others will be set back or repurposed; a residual core will still function in compressed, shoulder-season windows. The destination changes character without entirely disappearing.

What ultimately rations this transformation is not heat or sea level but water. Tunisia entered the 2020s at roughly 420 cubic metres of renewable freshwater per capita, well below the 500-cubic-metre absolute-scarcity threshold and roughly a tenth of the global average. Multi-year drought has pushed national dam reserves to historic lows, and the fossil aquifer that sustains the southern oases is being mined rather than recharged. Agriculture absorbs around three-quarters of national withdrawals, and the country recorded more than two thousand unannounced water cuts in 2024 alone. By 2100 the great majority of coastal urban and tourist drinking water will be desalinated, and the political economy of tourism will hinge on a question not yet politically settled: how to allocate scarce water among farms, households, beach resorts, and a new entrant — data centres attracted by Mediterranean cable proximity, francophone talent, and emerging digital partnerships. Whether that desalination is powered by genuinely additional renewable capacity, or by fossil generation that worsens coastal air, will define whether the adaptation is sustainable in more than name.

The cultural geography of Tunisian tourism shifts inland in response. Carthage and Kerkouane — the latter the only intact Punic town in the world — face acute coastal exposure that will demand a mixture of hard defence, soft engineering, and eventual managed retreat of interpretation infrastructure. The medina core of Sousse sits behind a hardening sea front. The inland Roman ensemble, by contrast, is structurally the biggest winner. Dougga, the best-preserved Roman city in North Africa, sits on rising ground. El Jem's great amphitheatre is structurally robust, though midday visitation will compress into dawn-and-dusk windows. A secondary circuit of Bulla Regia, Sbeitla, Mactaris, Haïdra, and Chemtou offers a coherent multi-day product, and Bulla Regia's famed underground villas — originally a Roman adaptation to summer heat — become a literal selling point as the climate warms. A serial UNESCO nomination of this inland circuit is plausibly the single highest-leverage cultural-tourism move available to Tunisia in the coming decade.

The oasis arc — Tozeur, Nefta, Douz, the mountain oases of Chebika and Tamerza, Matmata's troglodyte landscape, the Tataouine ksour — confronts a harder problem. Tozeur already records summer extremes well above forty-five degrees, and Nefta's principal spring failed two decades ago. The realistic 2100 model for this geography is low-volume, high-yield, and dispersed, with seasons compressed to October through April and visitor water budgets explicitly metered. The Star Wars filming sites layered across this same landscape — Mos Espa at Ong Jemel, the Lars homestead near Chott el Jerid, Sidi Driss in Matmata — face a parallel slow erosion from heat, dune migration, and physical deterioration. Their most plausible long-term preservation route lies in digital reconstruction, an approach already being prototyped by Tunisian start-ups in heritage interpretation, and one that will eventually anchor scientific preservation, carrying-capacity management, and remote access for Carthage, El Jem, Dougga, Kerkouane, and Kairouan as well.

Artificial intelligence cuts in both directions, often along the same axis. On the positive side, it supports dynamic carrying-capacity management calibrated against wet-bulb temperature, leak detection in a distribution network that currently loses roughly a quarter to a third of its supply, solar-desalination optimisation, precision viticulture in a Cap Bon harvest window moving several weeks earlier, multilingual interpretation that makes the Punic, Berber, Sufi, Jewish, and Roman strata of Tunisian heritage legible to wider audiences, and counter-terrorism systems that could over time retire the travel-advisory drag the country has carried since 2015. On the negative side, AI threatens substantial labour displacement in a hospitality sector that supports around 400,000 direct and indirect jobs in a country with chronic youth and graduate unemployment. The craft economy — the chechia makers of the Tunis souks, the Kairouan weavers, the Nabeul ceramicists, the El Jem mosaicists — faces structural pricing pressure from generative substitutes unless geographical-indication protection, content provenance standards, and authenticated-human-made pricing are aggressively pursued. Global booking platforms already extract a significant share of gross booking value to entities outside Tunisia, and an AI-mediated travel stack risks lengthening that rent chain further. Heritage interpretation itself risks homogenising into a legible Mediterranean pastiche rather than the specific cultural strata that constitute Tunisia's actual distinctiveness.

The other pressure on any sustainable trajectory is political. Tunisia's institutional environment has darkened materially since 2021, and the choice between institutional finance — multilateral development banks, the European Union, the World Bank — and transactional finance from Gulf, Chinese, and Russian sources will shape the kind of tourism investment the country can attract. The continuing engagement of the World Bank on water security through 2026, despite considerable bilateral friction, suggests that adaptation finance remains available where it is concretely scoped, even when broader relations are strained.

Pulling these threads together, the most likely 2100 picture is neither catastrophic collapse nor undisturbed continuity. Annual arrivals plateau in the range of ten to twelve million; the inland and oasis share of the mix roughly triples from today's level; the Sahel beach belt is partially defended, partially retreated, and partially repurposed for higher-yield product; and the central economic problem — chronically weak yield per visitor, masked by impressive headline arrival counts — is finally addressed by structural necessity rather than by choice. Tunisia cannot win the volume contest against Morocco or Türkiye, and the central insight of any honest planning exercise is that it should not try. The country's comparative advantage at the end of the century will lie in heritage density, oasis distinctiveness, and political-economic reform rather than in package-tourism scale. The destination that emerges will be smaller, more dispersed, more expensive, and — if the next decade of water and AI policy is got right — more durable than the one in place today.