Assessment of emergency rescue capability in mountainous tourism destinations under climate extremes

Climate change exacerbates tourism emergencies, making it increasingly critical to enhance mitigation and adaptation capacity to alleviate extreme climate’s impacts during tourism. Climate-induced impacts and threats in mountainous tourism areas are more challenging given complex terrains and multiple risk sources. Prior studies have focused on assessing climate-related impacts in mountainous tourism areas, while limited studies have investigated the emergency rescue capacity of mountainous tourism areas. This largely constrains decision makers to adopt proper solutions to enhance emergency rescue capacity. To address this research challenges, this study aims to assess emergency rescue capability through an empirical study of the Wulong Karst Tourism Destination (WKTD) area in Chongqing, China. In particular, based on road network and emergency response facility data, the accessibility of road network was delineated by the Spatial Design Network Analysis (sDNA) model. The results indicate that fire and medical rescue facilities were extremely limited and their service coverage was irregular. Valleys significantly narrowed rescue facilities’ service area and weakened their functional connection. With the vital 60-minute timeframe, the closeness and betweenness analyses revealed the low accessibility of global rescue roads, while relatively high accessibility of small-scale vehicle and pedestrian rescue roads. The Mean Crow Flight (MCF) and Diversion Ratio (DR) analyses verified that the accessibility of road rescue services was impeded by mountainous terrain. Overall, this study informs solutions pertaining to rescue and disaster mitigation in mountainous tourism areas.