Tourism Resilience Plan in Port Fairy under the Context of Climate Change

Nowadays, climate change is leading to play an increasing significant role in cities’ tourism development. Particularly, sea level rising is one of climate changes to coastal cities. This paper, focusing on the current situation Port Fairy in Melbourne is facing and the key topic of tourism development, proposes a detailed action plan for retreat. It, firstly, defines key terms towards resilience and tourism resilience. Then, concrete problem analysis and critique is given. Lastly, a detailed action plan in three stages will be given to implement the recommendation.


Introduction
Climate change is increasingly influencing the development of human being and urban environment.Port Fairy in Melbourne is a typical coastal city facing sea level rising as a result of climate change.This paper, focusing on the current situation Port Fairy is facing and the key topic of tourism development, proposes a detailed action plan for retreat.Around the world, many coastal cities as famous tourism destinations are facing the similar challenge like Port Fairy in Melbourne.Once sea level rises, the tourism industry and local residents are influenced to large extent.The action plan for treat could be an example and provides some suggestions for other coastal cities to deal with seal level rising and achieve tourism resilience to ensure the economic development.However, the retreat plan has not been taken into action already and further assessment towards the plan should be taken.
The article is organised as follows: firstly, key terms towards resilience and X. Y. Xuan, M. Zhang tourism resilience are defined to ensure the accurate understanding; then, concrete problem analysis and critique is given towards Port Fairy in Melbourne; lastly, a detailed action plan in three stages will be given to implement the recommendation.

Resilience
Bruneau et al. states that resilience depends on four properties: robustness (the physical strength to withstand a disturbance without functional degradation); redundancy (the extent to which system components are substitutable); resourcefulness (the capacity to identify problems and mobilize needed resources) and rapidity (the capacity to restore the system in a timely manner) [1].
Engineering resilience is defined as the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium or steady-state after a disturbance [1].This disturbance can be either natural disasters or artificial crisis.
Different from engineering resilience, ecological resilience is "the magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structure" [2], which lays stress on "the ability to persist and the ability to adapt" [2].
Evolutionary resilience, also named as socio-ecological resilience, is the ability of complex socio-ecological systems to change, adapt, and, crucially, transform in response to stresses and strains [3].

Characteristics of Resilience
Beilinconcludes the main four characteristics of resilience: diversity; modularity; feedback and redundancy.The concrete definitions are as follows: a) Diversity: It provides the source of options including both ecological mosaic (such as plant species palette)and the social mosaic (plethora of that communities can draw on for innovation and adaptation); b) Modularity: It refers to that how components in a system are linked; c) Feedback: Feedback informs how quickly and strongly the consequences of change in one part of the system will impact the other parts; d) Redundancy: Redundancy refers to the capacity to sustain sub-systems and functions to support overarching systems-the capacity to maintain multiple options [3].A system is likely to be more robust if high levels of redundancy exist and can be actively built into social ecological systems.

Strategies for Resilience
Strategies for resilience are concluded in Figure 1.

Tourism Resilience
Indeed, numerous scholars have developed conceptual frameworks to elaborate the resilience and adaptiveness in the tourism sector relationship between tourism system and its reliance or adaptiveness [5].In the practical term, Calgaro and Cochrane identify the actions for reducing vulnerability and building Figure 1.Strategies for resilience [4].resilience in Thailand after the Asian tsunami.Even in 2009, the UNWTO formally establishes a Tourism Resilience Committee, using "resilience" in the standard layman's sense instead of social-ecological intimations [6].
Cochrane explains how a resilient tourism system can be established.As shown in below, this system consists of three key elements: harness market forces, leadership and stakeholder cohesion, which is shown in Figure 2 [6].
"Harness market forces" emphasizes the role of market engagement in addressing social justice, environmental concerns as well as profit margins in the three-bottom-line sustainability [7].Stakeholder cohesion and associative working is the second element, it considers all sectors (public, private and the third sectors) and their roles, strengths, and limitations.Through the coordination of all the stakeholders, resources can be exploited equitably while the needs of current and future generations are both considered [8].Thirdly, consistent, and strong leadership is stressed, which can be reflected from the vision, plan and management and plays a significant role in reconcile the contradictions towards resource exploitation, market engagement and stakeholders [9].Moreover, flexibility, learning and adaptability are required in the system.Flexibility escapes over-rigidity which may result in inability of accommodating stress.To achieve effective adaptability and flexibility, the aspects from other systems affecting SES also should be incorporated into regulations and institutions.Therefore, learning towards other relevant systems is required as well to ensure this understanding [6].
The following actions plan is developed through references of "strategies for resilience" and "the sphere of tourism resilience" to address the impacts of climate change (focuses on sea level rise) on tourism development.

Initial Recommendations
In the previous group presentation, team 4 proposed the recommendations for  tourism and sea level rise as: respond through Folk; protect Port Fairy; diversify tourism."Respond through folk" is adopted as the initial recommendation for this plan.More specifically, it focused on gradual retreat, which intended to inform tourists about the challenges that Port Fairy is facing as the sea level is continuously rising and gives tourists deeper understanding of the relocation of the Folk Festival [10].

Problem Analysis and Critique
Problem analysis and critique is mainly based on the problems that the initial recommendation aims at and gives comprehensive considerations towards Port Fairy's current situation and challenges.The recommendation stated before is protecting Port Fairy, which contains the issues towards retreat due to climate change and relocation of the Folk Festival.

Retreat
The recommendation, based on climate change (especially sea level rise), proposes the plan to retreat of Port Fairy.This part intends to analyse the current problems of climate change and then have a discussion of retreat.

1) Climate change
As to the influence of climate change on Port Fairy, it mainly refers to storm surge and flood inundation in the short term and sea level rise in the long term due to Port Fairy's geographic location [13].Port Fairy is a coastal town at the end of the Great Ocean Road, south-western Victoria, Australia.It is a typical community that is situated at the interface between river catchment, estuary and ocean [14], which makes this town vulnerable to natural environment.

a) Storm surge and flood inundation
Port Fairy has suffered storm surge and floor inundation many times in its history and it is predicted to experience increasing floods in the following years [11].

Relocation of Folk Festival
The initial recommendation points out that Folk Festival will be relocated during the process of gradual retreat.However, the recommendation should consider the development of tourism industry holistically, rather than just focusing on single tourist event.

1) Tourism development in Port Fairy
Tourism industry plays a vital role in local economy.And it has some characteristics that can reflect some challenges that Port Fairy is facing.
a) Rely on domestic tourists X. Y. Xuan, M. Zhang According to Tourism Research Australia, in the last 5 years, the average number of visitors to Port Fairy is 237,133 while the average length of stay is 3 nights.Among these visitors, over 90 percent of them are from Australia, as the following Figure 5 shows [15].
The current development of tourism industry has showed its domestic seasonality.Obviously, January and March are the most popular seasons and the winter (June, July, August and September) is less popular, which is shown in shows the intense festivals in Port Fairy: (2) Issues towards the relocation of Folk Festival Apart from the local context of tourism development, there are some issues ignored in the initial recommendation towards the relocation of Folk Festival.
a) The needs to invest the facilities for Folk Festival As the Folk Festival is increasingly popular, current facilities may not satisfy the growing needs for transports and staging equipment, investments are needed.However, constructions of new Port Fairy and new facilities are lengthy process and require injection of consistent funds which lays a heavy burden on financial support.
b) The challenge to make new festival

Conclusion
In regards to the recommendation, both gradual retreat and relocation of the Folk Festival are feasible, however some issues still need further consideration.Hence, the following actions plan will propose corresponding actions to help in resolving these issues.

Actions Plan
This actions plan intends to assume the new address for relocating Port Fairy.
Then, three stages of actions will be discussed.

Relocate Port Fairy
A new site is chosen as shown in Figure 7.The reasons to support the choice are: Geographically, it is outside the flooding zone in year 2100 (the flood area has been shown in Figure 8), which minimizes the flood risks.Moreover, the new site is located near the Princess Highway, which provides convenient transport.
In terms of planning law and land use, the site is currently in the Farming Zone according to Moyne Planning Scheme.No permit is required for building dwellings while permissions are required for constructing car parks, group accommodations, leisure and recreations, residential hotels and restaurants [14].Local council might negotiate with the state government for seeking ownership of the land and land development rights for new Port Fairy.

Detailed Actions in Different Stages
The first stage (the short term 5 -10 years) is towards assuming change and uncertainty while the second (the medium term 10 -20 years) and third stage (the long term 20 -50 years) focus on nurturing conditions for recovery and renewal after disturbance.Justification: These reports record the current data of town, which is useful for the construction of new town and memorizing the significant history of current Port Fairy.b) Action 2: Develop plan for building sea walls, emergency alert telephone warning system and the organization of residents' retreat to ensure community safety before retreating.
Justification: Residents and infrastructures cannot relocate immediately, therefore it is necessary to ensure their safety while they are still staying in the original town.Flood-warnings and preventions are suggested by SES (2013) to protect residents from thunderstorm and floods [8].c) Action 3: Negotiate with State government on Port Fairy's new development of: site selection, land ownership transfer, rights of land use and development, funds support.

X. Y. Xuan, M. Zhang
Justification: To develop the Farming Zone, state government's permission is needed [16], hence negotiation with state government towards this site is required.Besides, it also needs the financial support from state government for the new development and removal.4) Action 4: Develop new Port Fairy's plan that ensures resource conservation through emphasising the use of recycled materials from original site.
Justification: Sustainable management of resources is highlighted in the tourism resilience [3].Through recycling the materials in the original town, it helps reduce the waste and promote resource efficiency.Justification: As Cochrane suggests, stakeholder cohesion and associative working not only reflect the social justice but also highlight the sustainable development which take the next generations' needs into account [2].
Objective 3: Develop tourism retreat plan through incorporation with key stakeholders.
a) Action 1: Formulate a marketing strategy through inter-corporation with key stakeholders that clarifies the destination positioning, maintain and extend the cooperation with domestic and international travel agencies, Great Ocean Road Regional Tourism, Tourism Victoria and so on.
Justification: Cochrane stresses that successful engagement with the market is vital for the development of tourism industry.Through coordination with stakeholders in different scales, internal and external communication is strengthened [5].
b) Action 2: Develop a comprehensive and considerate plan for the relocation of festivals, including the construction and improvement of necessary facilities, the advertisements, and signs to guide the new address, particularly reinforcing the characteristics of Folk Festival.
Justification: Particular plan should be made in order to protect the traditional and representative festivals from loss of characters and attractions.c) Action 3: Design new attractive tourism products around the year such as Community gardens and food tours can be taken into consideration.Besides, a museum made of recycled materials of old town will be designed as well to store the memory and history of the original Port Fairy, which can also be a unique landmark, as the following Figure 9. Justification: Development of tourism industry should be kept on the basis of market and tourists preferences.The event "Last tour to Port Fairy in our memory" can be regarded as typical event tourism to attract tourists.

Conclusion
Based on strategies for resilience and tourism resilience, the action plan is implemented by 3 detailed stages.Stage 1 can be thought as the most significant stage for preparing and planning, which lays a good foundation for stage 2 and 3.The stages with certain objectives could be considered as a guidance for retreating similar cities especially for the cities relying on tourism under the similar context.With the increasing challenge brought by climate change and sea level rising, the article proposes appropriate plan and actions to suggest the future development of current coastal tourism destinations.That's to say, plan and actions can be well applied on the tourism destinations affected by sea level rising.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Comparisons of 100 year ARI flood extent and storm surge extent with 0, 0.8 and 1.2 sea level rise [14].

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.It is necessary to consider how to promote a more balanced tourism industry around the whole year.b) Dependence on festivals Apart from similar activities offered in other coast towns, such as fishing and bird-viewing, visitors mainly are attracted by Port Fairy's festivals.It leads to a rather mono-sources of income for the local tourism.The following Table 1

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. New location of port fairy.

Figure 8 .
Figure 8.The relationship between new location and current port fairy [15].

5) Action 5 :
Raise funds from a wide range of governments, NGOs, community groups, Tourism Victoria and local tourism industry.Public-private partnerships can also be supported that help raise funds from private sector and release the financial burdens on the governments.Objective 2: Ensure all stakeholders involved in the preparation process.a) Action 1: Hold public consultations before and during the development of master plan to ensure everyone' voice are heard, key issues and outcomes identified in the consultations should be used to amend the master plan.b) Action 2: Set up retreat association consisting of community members that help strengthen the communication with local council and keep informed towards the retreat plan.