Colombia

By 2100, Colombian tourism will most likely look very different from the 6.7-million-visitor industry the country recorded in 2024. Under a middle-path warming scenario of roughly 2.7 to 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, Colombia retains the macro-shape of its current tourism portfolio — Cartagena, Medellín, the Coffee Region, Tayrona, the Amazon around Leticia, the Pacific coast, San Andrés and Providencia — but each anchor destination is materially transformed: smaller, more expensive, more digitally rationed, more community-governed, and embedded in a national economy that has at least partially decoupled from oil and coal. Under a higher-emissions track approaching four degrees, the same map is recognizable but several anchor destinations become functionally degraded, and the industry's geography shifts toward higher-altitude, Andean-interior climate refuges. The most-likely outcome is a hybrid in which Colombia experiences high-end regional impacts because tropical Andean glaciers, páramos, coral reefs and the southwestern Amazon all sit close to physical tipping thresholds at relatively low warming levels.

The physical climate envelope is largely already set. Colombia's Andean glaciers — once visible from Bogotá's eastern hills and central to the cosmovision of the Kogi, Arhuaco, Wiwa, Kankuamo and U'wa peoples — will be gone well before 2100. National monitoring shows the country has already lost more than 60 percent of its glacier coverage since the mid-twentieth century, the Cerros de la Plaza glacier in El Cocuy was officially declared extinct in early 2026, and all six remaining ice bodies are projected to disappear by mid-century under any plausible scenario. By 2100 there will be no Andean glacier tourism in Colombia at all, and the visual and spiritual loss for the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and El Cocuy communities is total.

Cartagena and the Caribbean coast face combined sea-level rise and subsidence on the order of 0.7 to 1.0 meter by 2100 under a middle-path scenario, and 1.0 to 1.5 meters under high emissions. Peer-reviewed work projects roughly 52 cm of mean sea-level rise by 2100 under the middle path and 76 cm under high emissions for Cartagena, plus around 22.5 cm of additional relative rise from documented coastal subsidence — placing the city among the Caribbean's four worst inundation hotspots. Coastal elevation modelling shows Castillogrande, Manga, Manzanillo Island and the Mamonal industrial-port zone all below water level by 2100 without major adaptation, and Tierra Bomba's cemetery had already been destroyed by routine flooding by 2024. The most-likely 2100 Cartagena is a smaller, fortified, partly elevated heritage core with cruise terminals migrated elsewhere, Getsemaní fully gentrified, Afro-Colombian residents largely displaced to peri-urban Bolívar, and a high-end, algorithmically priced tourism economy handling perhaps one to two million annual visitors. Under high emissions, the historic center becomes a partly flooded, episodically accessible site visited mainly during dry-season windows.

The Amazon dieback risk is the single biggest divergence between climate scenarios. Ensemble modelling finds that most Earth System Models project significant Amazon dieback under high-emissions trajectories, with onset typically between 2050 and 2100 and full expression in the following century; under the middle path with strong deforestation control, localized dieback in the southeastern arc is likely but basin-wide collapse is avoided. Colombia's deforestation arc in Caquetá, Guaviare, Meta and Putumayo accounted for roughly half of national forest loss before falling from 174,103 hectares in 2021 to about 113,608 hectares in 2024 under the current administration's containment approach, then ticking up again in early 2024 due to organized-crime activity. The most-likely trajectory is patchy, severe drying of the Colombian Amazon's southern margin by 2100 with seasonal fire and biome shift along the Caquetá River basin.

Páramos — the high-altitude wetland ecosystems unique to the northern Andes — face an even more compressed timeline, with downscaled modelling projecting 39 to 52 percent of current páramo area becoming climatically unsuitable in the dry season under high emissions by mid-century and that figure expanding across most of the eastern cordillera by 2100. Because Chingaza supplies roughly 70 percent of Bogotá's drinking water and the Rabanal and Guerrero páramos have already lost 47 to 60 percent of native vegetation since 1984, water security for the capital becomes the central adaptation problem of the century. Water rationing — already imposed in 2024 when Chingaza reservoirs hit 17 percent capacity — becomes recurrent rather than exceptional.

Each tourism hotspot evolves along a distinct trajectory shaped by physical exposure and governance. Tayrona and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta most likely become high-value, low-volume, Indigenous-governed destinations under co-management frameworks consolidated through the Escazú Agreement, with AI-enforced visitor caps holding loads to a fraction of pre-2030 peaks. San Andrés, Providencia and the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve retain partly restored "managed reef" systems using assisted coral evolution and AI-monitored marine-protected-area enforcement under the middle path; under high emissions, recurrent mass bleaching makes shallow coral tourism non-viable by the 2060s or 2070s and the destination shifts toward mangrove, beach and Raizal cultural tourism. The Amazon ecotourism circuit around Leticia stabilizes as a small, premium, community-led offering if illegal alluvial mining is contained — a 2025 Constitutional Court ruling on the Yuruparí region found mercury concentrations seventeen times above safe levels in water, fish and human hair across thirty Indigenous groups — but hollows out by the 2070s under unchecked spillover and high-emissions dieback. The Coffee Cultural Landscape remains climatically resilient but its terroir migrates 200 to 400 meters upslope by 2100, hollowing parts of the cultural landscape that earned UNESCO inscription and pushing Salento toward a fully gentrified, algorithm-driven destination economy. The Pacific Chocó coast most likely sees its humpback-whale-watching season compressed and shifted but its core cetacean asset intact in either scenario, positioning Nuquí and Bahía Solano as Colombia's premier high-value ecotourism region by mid-century if state presence and mining enforcement consolidate.

Bogotá's urban tourism most likely doubles in absolute visitor numbers by mid-century then plateaus as Colombia's population peaks near 55 million in the 2050s and declines toward 40 to 43 million by 2100. The Río Bogotá megaproject built around the Salitre and Canoas wastewater treatment plants will most likely have brought the river to agricultural-quality water by 2060, removing one of the worst negative tourism externalities. Medellín's electrified transit transition reduces ambient particulate pollution substantially by mid-century, Comuna 13 tourism gentrifies fully, El Poblado consolidates as a digital-nomad enclave, and the city's "urban transformation" narrative gives way to a "post-cartel heritage" reframing.

Artificial intelligence becomes operational infrastructure across the conservation estate and the tourism economy. Real-time satellite detection of deforestation, alluvial mining and illegal coca becomes the spine of enforcement; bioacoustic and camera-trap networks running species-recognition models monitor a country that leads the world in recorded bird diversity; AI-managed visitor quotas with dynamic pricing govern Tayrona, Los Nevados, Chiribiquete and Caño Cristales; translation and interpretation tools help document Wayuunaiki, Nasa Yuwe, Embera, Inga and the Tucanoan languages. The positive effects are concrete — earlier detection of illegal incursions, decentralization pressure on over-stressed hotspots, revenue distribution platforms governed by Indigenous and Afro-Colombian councils. The negative effects are equally concrete: algorithmic concentration on the most photogenic sites, accelerated rent extraction in gentrifying neighborhoods, surveillance overreach in Indigenous territories absent genuine free, prior and informed consent, data-center water and energy footprints competing with already-stressed urban water systems, and — most worryingly — AI-enabled extractive industries outpacing AI-enabled conservation, because enforcement budgets are public and contested while extractive budgets are private and gold-price-driven.

The political backdrop is decisive. Tourism revenues exceeded coal revenues for the first time in 2024, lending economic credibility to the ecotourism-instead-of-extraction frame, and the Escazú Agreement was ratified. Yet Colombia remained the world's deadliest country for environmental defenders every year from 2022 through 2024, and over 600 environmental leaders have been killed since the 2016 Peace Accord. Armed-group cells and organized-crime networks built around gold, cocaine and timber will continue to constrain tourism viability in Catatumbo, Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo and parts of the Pacific into the 2030s at minimum. The country's forty-six national parks, five UNESCO biosphere reserves and eight UNESCO World Heritage sites form the durable spatial scaffolding for whatever tourism survives climate disruption.

Colombian sustainable tourism in 2100 most likely amounts to a smaller, more expensive industry — perhaps 5 to 8 million international visitors annually rather than the 15 million implied by trend extrapolation — with a portfolio rebalanced away from the over-stressed Caribbean lowland coast toward the Pacific, the Andean interior and the Coffee Region. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian co-governance is institutionalized through Escazú-derived consultation regimes, AI handles carrying capacity and enforcement, pollution problems on the Bogotá and Magdalena rivers are reduced if not eliminated, low-grade armed conflict persists in specific corridors, the glaciers are gone, Cartagena is partly walled and pumped and partly retreated, and the Seaflower reefs are degraded. Tourism in this future is less a mass-market industry than an infrastructure of small, certified, technologically rationed, community-licensed encounters with a biodiversity and cultural inheritance that the country has, against very long odds, mostly managed to keep. The decisive uncertainty is not climate per se — that envelope is largely already determined — but governance: whether Colombia consolidates the state-presence-plus-Indigenous-rights model into a durable institutional settlement, or whether extractive economies reassert themselves. The most-likely answer is partial consolidation, enough to preserve the core conservation estate and the high-value destinations, not enough to deliver the "country of beauty" narrative in full.