Australia

By the end of this century, Australian tourism will be defined less by what has been added to the visitor experience than by what has been preserved, replaced, or reinvented in the face of a profoundly altered climate. On a trajectory most consistent with current global policy — somewhere between two and a half and three and a half degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels — the country's iconic destinations will look radically different from those of the mid-2020s. Tourism will not collapse; it will pivot. The most plausible central picture is one in which Indigenous-led, climate-resilient, and largely net-zero-operated tourism becomes the new mainstream, anchored by a much stronger Aboriginal cultural sovereignty layer and a regulated regenerative model that has displaced the self-cancelling logic of "last-chance" travel.

The Great Barrier Reef remains the single most climate-exposed major tourism asset in the country, and its transformation by 2100 will be the most visible. After the better part of a century of accelerating thermal stress, the reef as a continuous, coral-dominated ecosystem will not survive in anything resembling its present form. What persists instead is a fundamentally simplified system, dominated in many places by algae and microbial communities, with scattered remnant coral patches concentrated in cooler southern waters and in deeper mesophotic zones. Alongside these natural refugia sit engineered "reef arks," where heat-tolerant assisted-evolution corals are sustained at considerable expense as both restoration projects and visitor attractions. Cairns and Port Douglas operate as reef science cities, combining boutique boat-based access to managed coral patches, working research stations open to paying visitors, and high-fidelity virtual immersion for those unwilling or unable to swim in warmer, jellyfish-rich waters. Operators are predominantly net-zero, using hydrogen and biofuel-powered vessels, and a mandatory restoration levy is built into every ticket — the regulatory descendant of today's environmental management charge. Visitor numbers are well below their 2020s peak, but yield per visitor is substantially higher. 

Coastal and beach tourism, the country's largest segment, has had to confront the most expensive adaptation challenge of all. Sea-level rise in the order of half a metre to a metre by 2100 has produced shoreline retreat that in places exceeds a hundred metres, and tropical-cyclone intensity has increased even as cyclone frequency has not. The response on the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast has been a frankly engineered one: large-scale beach nourishment, hardened seawalls, offshore reef structures, and selective managed retreat where the cost-benefit balance no longer holds. Bondi, Manly, and Cronulla survive as Sydney's tourism beaches, partly because many Australian beaches have room to migrate landward under active management, but their foreshore boardwalks, kiosks, and surf clubs have been largely rebuilt further inland, and storm-surge flooding is a routine event rather than a rare crisis. Western Australia's metropolitan and Coral Coast beaches are less reshaped by erosion but more exposed to marine heatwaves, which periodically devastate fish populations and seagrass meadows. Stinger nets, lycra-mandated swimming, and non-lethal shark-management technologies have all extended further south as the East Australian Current continues to warm.

The Red Centre's tourism viability hinges not on ecosystem collapse but on extreme heat and water scarcity. Summer days above forty-five degrees are commonplace by 2100, and fifty-degree events are plausible across much of the year, making outdoor exploration during the traditional southern summer effectively impossible without active cooling. The peak season has therefore been inverted: December to February is now a near-shutdown of outdoor product, with the offering reorientated around dawn and dusk operations, climate-controlled cultural centres, drone-light shows that have evolved from the Wintjiri Wiru concept, subterranean heritage interpretation, and dark-sky astronomical tourism. Atmospheric water generation, careful groundwater management, and solar-powered desalination of bore water support a smaller, more circular resort economy. Most significantly, the Yulara area is operated under expanded Anangu economic and cultural governance, building on the closure of Uluru to climbers in 2019. Anangu storytelling, language revival, and on-Country knowledge transmission have moved to the centre of the visit, so that experiencing the desert is increasingly synonymous with experiencing Anangu Country.

Kakadu offers perhaps the starkest example of climate-driven landscape transformation. Saltwater intrusion into freshwater floodplains, well advanced even by the 2020s, has by 2100 substantially erased the iconic Yellow Water dawns, the magpie-goose congregations, and the paperbark wetlands that defined the park's image for two generations of visitors. In their place are mangrove forests, saline mudflats, and a reconfigured suite of crocodile, mudflat, and saltwater wetland experiences. Bininj and Mungguy management has expanded significantly under joint arrangements with Parks Australia, and ranger-led adaptation work — levee construction, mangrove restoration, bush-tucker biodiversity refugia — has itself become a central tourism narrative. Rock-art tourism at sites such as Burrungkuy and Ubirr survives but increasingly under climate-controlled enclosure to manage heat, humidity, and biological growth on the artworks.

Tasmania, by contrast, is the clearest relative winner. Its higher latitude buffers some warming, its wet-season rainfall is projected to increase modestly, and its wilderness assets remain world-class even as alpine fires, marine heatwaves, and pressure on endemic species grow. By 2100 it has emerged as Australia's premier nature, wilderness, and wine destination. The national wine map has been redrawn around it: as the Barossa, McLaren Vale, Hunter Valley, and parts of Margaret River become marginal for premium dry reds at scale, capital and viticultural expertise have migrated south, and the Tamar Valley, the East Coast around Freycinet, and the Coal River Valley anchor a flourishing cool-climate wine-tourism economy. Sparkling wine, pinot noir, and aromatic whites are flagship products, and cool-climate viticulture has expanded onto King Island, Bass Strait islands, and high-elevation Tasmanian highlands. The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area faces continuing fire pressure but remains a global magnet, and palawa-led cultural products, descended from the wukalina walk model, anchor the cultural offer statewide.

Mainland skiing, on the other hand, has effectively ended. After decades of declining maximum snow depth and shrinking seasons, snowmaking is no longer energetically or economically viable across most resorts. Remnant operations in the highest cirques exist only as boutique, weather-dependent boutique experiences. Yet the alpine resorts have transitioned successfully: year-round mountain biking, hiking along the Australian Alps Walking Track, wildflower and bushtucker tourism, dark-sky tourism, and high-end alpine cuisine now sustain the regional economy. Conservation tourism — viewing the mountain pygmy-possum, observing Bogong moth recovery, walking carefully managed feldmark refugia — is significant but conducted under tight management, and many alpine vegetation communities survive only in carefully protected pockets. Wildlife tourism more broadly has reorganised around fenced and intensively managed sanctuary landscapes for koalas in former heat-stressed ranges, around captive-breeding and cryobanking programs for cool-adapted relict species in the Wet Tropics, and around shifted whale-watching seasons and orca tourism on the southern coasts. Whether Tasmanian devils survive in the wild depends on the success of disease-management interventions; in their absence, viewing is sanctuary-based.

Aviation remains the binding constraint on international tourism, and its transformation is therefore central. By 2100, sustainable aviation fuel and synthetic e-kerosene produced from green hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide have largely replaced fossil jet fuel on long-haul routes, while hydrogen and electric propulsion dominate regional and short-haul flying. High-speed rail along the Sydney–Melbourne and Sydney–Brisbane corridors, an electrified light-vehicle fleet, and ubiquitous fast-charging on remote touring routes have absorbed a meaningful share of what used to be domestic flying. The cost of reaching Australia is modestly higher in real terms than it was a century earlier, which has tilted the inbound mix toward higher-yield, longer-stay visitors and toward an Asian middle-class market — particularly from Southeast Asia, China, and India — that now dwarfs traditional North American and European source regions.

Underlying all of this is a quiet but decisive shift in tourism's governing ethic. The "see it before it's gone" instinct that drove visitation through the 2020s and 2030s was always self-cancelling: emissions from travelling accelerated the loss being witnessed. By 2100 the dominant logic is regenerative. Visitor activity is required, by regulation as much as by preference, to leave the destination measurably better than it was found, whether through restoration levies, citizen-science participation, mandatory dispersal away from over-pressured icons, or direct contributions to Indigenous co-management. Net-zero hospitality has evolved into net-positive standards. Biometric park entry and dynamic pricing manage flows. Indigenous-owned and Indigenous-led operations are no longer a niche segment but the cultural backbone of the visitor economy in iconic destinations from the Kimberley to Cape York to Sea Country across the reef. Australian tourism in 2100 is smaller in some traditional forms — reef snorkelling at scale, mainland skiing, mass low-cost beach tourism — and larger in others, particularly Indigenous, regenerative, Tasmanian, and virtual or augmented experiences. The destinations that thrive will be those that embedded climate adaptation and Indigenous co-governance into their core offer well before the middle of the century. Those that did not will be remembered, increasingly, in archives and virtual reconstructions, and in the carbon-rich slipstreams of the visitors who once came to say goodbye.