The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified Australia as among the developed nations most at risk from climate change effects. Key tourism icon destinations and the tourism sector generally have been identified as being particularly at risk. This paper reports on an interdisciplinary, multi-case study approach to assess tourism stakeholders' knowledge of, and approaches to, climate change adaptation and to explore the potential for building a self-assessment toolkit that can be exported to other tourism destinations. This study examined existing knowledge on anticipated biophysical changes and, through primary research (stakeholder interviews and social learning workshops), gauged the expected adaptive approaches of destination communities and the tourism sector to these changes for 2020, 2050 and 2070. The facilitated workshops generated a common set of adaptation strategies across a diverse set of tourist destinations. A key finding from the workshops is that the tourism sector is not yet ready to invest in climate change adaptation because of the perceived uncertainties. Ongoing leadership for such measures were seen to rest with the public sector, especially local authorities. Whether such assessments can be self-generated or require specialist facilitation remains open to debate.

Psychometric approaches to measuring sense-of-place variables have focused primarily on the strength of association between individuals and some researcher-defined spatial object. Environmental psychology also has a long tradition of mapping spatial settings and developing methods in natural resource management for measuring the spatial component of sense of place. Our work describes these methods and integrates them with an atittudinal approach that captures individual-level spatial variation and its meaning. We present and demonstrate a complementary data-analysis approach that uses structural equation modelling to integrate the spatial and physical features of places with attitude and behavioural variables. We identify relationships between variables coded from mapping data and attitudes, and demonstrate that this type of spatial data can be modelled using structural equation techniques.

Few studies investigating the psychological determinants of water consumption and conservation use metered household water data. Studies that have used metered consumption have found that individual-level motivations are often weak predictors. This may be due to the psychological determinants being measured at the individual level and metered consumption at the household level. This article contributes to the water consumption literature by (a) identifying the determinants of change in water consumption over time and (b) testing effects in single-person households where levels of analysis are equivalent. We applied models to data from South Australia (N = 410) and Victoria (N = 205) and found that variables at the individual, household, dwelling, and regional levels predict the initial level of consumption and/or its rate of change. Some individual-level variables were not significant predictors of household consumption but did predict individual consumption. We discuss these results in light of previous research and offer avenues for future research.