The key problem is how to address Antarctica’s uncertain tourism future. This project aims to strike a balance between tourism and protection, to avoid negative impacts of (over)tourism and reactive responses when damage is (irreversibly) done. In terms of scientific breakthroughs, first, we bring mapping adaptation pathways as a novel approach into tourism studies. This planning approach addresses the uncertainty and challenges of decision‐making about tourism-driven change and impacts. It enables the consideration of multiple possible futures and facilitates exploration and analysis of a range of policy options (course of action adopted or pursued by a stakeholder) across those futures, including adaptation tipping points at which policy options become inadequate for meeting objectives when situations change. Mapping adaptation pathways enable us to identify preferred pathways and design a signal monitoring system to detect and anticipate (future) change to support adaptive planning. Second, this will be a first-of-its-kind study in tourism that combines different types of scenario planning methods, based on knowledge co-production, to create a large set of future scenarios including the probable (WP1), possible (WP2), preferred (WP3) and plausible (WP4) tourism futures of Antarctica. Policy options are evaluated against these scenarios to inform decision-making about their robustness in the context of adaptation pathways. Both innovations in methods are scalable, offering frameworks for future application in other tourism destinations worldwide that face similar challenges of protection objectives and dealing with uncertain tourism futures. In terms of societal breakthroughs, the project inspires a shift from advance-worrying to advance thinking and planning about Antarctica’s tourism future. The project offers tools (future scenarios, adaptation pathways, signal monitoring system) that help public and private stakeholders to make informed and robust decisions regarding Antarctica’s tourism future, in which values and qualities are protected and there is a social licence for tourism in Antarctica.
