How Asia and the Pacific can take the heat off tourism

Extreme heat responds to practical, affordable, evidence-based action, making tourism a promising place to initiate intervention measures.

Introduction

Of all the hazards facing Asia and the Pacific, extreme heat is the one moving fastest and the one that responds most readily to measures already within reach.

Heatwaves have overtaken floods, cyclones, and earthquakes as the region’s most widespread risk related to the changing climate, according to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific’s Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2025: Rising Heat, Rising Risk. Workplace exposure to excessive heat affects almost 75% of the regional workforce and several economies are reliant on one exposed sector: tourism. It contributes about 28% of gross domestic product in the Maldives and nearly 10% in Cambodia, where it directly employs more than 500,000 people.

Read one way, that is a warning. Read another, it is an opening. Heat’s damage is driven less by temperature itself than by the absence of warning, shade, hydration, rest, and treatment. With appropriate planning, these can be implemented at relatively low cost, compared to the impacts of extreme heat.

Heat as a planning assumption

Recent history explains why extreme heat deserves a planned response rather than a seasonal one. The year 2024 was the hottest on record globally, with Asia warming faster than the global average and at roughly twice its late-twentieth-century rate.

Cambodia reached 42.8°C in April 2024, its highest in 170 years and Tajikistan passed 40°C in July 2025. In the Kyrgyz Republic, average temperatures have risen 1.2°C, with implications for Lake Issyk-Kul, its leading summer destination. In the Maldives, warming seas are accelerating coral bleaching, and over 90% of resorts report beach erosion.

Together these describe a shift in the baseline on which tourism assets, staffing models, and seasonal calendars were built. Given existing expertise within the sector of accommodating monsoon seasons and demand cycles, the tourism sector is well placed to lead adjustments to address extreme and chronic heat.

Difference between heat and other hazards

Three features separate heat from the other hazards which impact the tourism sector.

The adverse health effects of extreme and chronic heat occur through heat exposure without safeguards, rather than the absolute temperature itself. Exposure can be managed through shade, hydration, rest hour adjustments, alerts, and treatment.

The cost of interventions is relatively inexpensive. Shaded walkways, passive cooling, heat–health training, and warning systems are modest expenses set against a sector which can be worth close to a third of national output.

Interventions can be effective immediately. Unlike seawalls or reef restoration, heat measures can be installed ahead of the damage and deliver benefits in the season they are introduced.

Heat impact on the tourism industry

Prolonged exposure can trigger heat stroke and aggravate cardiovascular and renal conditions, while chronic heat raises the prevalence of vector-borne diseases, such as dengue and malaria. 

Many tourism workers and contractors, including vendors, drivers, guides, and construction workers have limited access to shade or rest. Service-sector work hours lost to heat in the Maldives were 238% higher in 2014–2023 than in 1991–2000. 

Further, women make up 52% of Asia and the Pacific's tourism workforce, often in informal roles with the least access to cooling or flexible hours. As a result, published statistics are likely to underestimate the true impact of work hours lost to heat.

Extreme and chronic heat can also impact the assets tourism depends on, such as reefs, glaciers, beaches, and lakes. All 23 monitored glaciers in High-Mountain Asia—which spans 10 countries, including the People’s Republic of China, India, Pakistan, and Tajikistan—lost mass in 2025, driven by above-average temperatures and below-average winter snow, with multiple glacial lake outburst floods and glacier collapses recorded during the year.

Emerging practice across four economies

Cambodia has introduced heatwave-responsive protocols in tourist zones, invested in shaded walkways and passive cooling, and launched one of Southeast Asia’s first National Cooling Action Plans in 2023, with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) supporting a heat early warning system .

The Maldives, the first country in Asia and the first Small Island Developing State to adopt the UN Secretary-General’s Early Warnings for All initiative, is building a multi-hazard early warning system that pushes alerts to resort operators and coastal communities.

The Kyrgyz Republic is embedding disaster management and hygiene in tourism curricula alongside the ADB-supported Issyk-Kul project , while Tajikistan’s Avicenna Tajik State Medical University trains physicians in resort medicine and is building telemedicine to monitor tourist health .

The H.E.A.T. Framework: Applying the pillars to tourism

In February 2025, ADB convened stakeholders at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, producing the H.E.A.T. Framework , a structured approach with four pillars applicable to the tourism sector:

• Health sector adaptation strategies strengthen healthcare capacity, medical education, and community-based action. In the tourism context, this involves equipping hospitality staff and tourism workers to recognize heat stress symptoms and respond effectively.
• Enablers establish early warning systems, promote equity-driven policies, and secure sustainable financing, recognizing that heat resilience requires dedicated funding streams.
• Architectonics adapt the built environment through urban planning that integrates heat-health considerations. This includes nature-based solutions such as urban greening and green corridors, which cool cities while improving air quality and mental health.
• Technologies and tools leverage artificial intelligence and satellite data to identify risks. The urban heat and health toolkit of the ADB Climate and Health Initiative demonstrates how these technologies can be used to support evidence-based policy and decision making to reduce the impacts of heat stress.

Way forward

Countries like Cambodia, Kyrgyz Republic, the Maldives, and Tajikistan are building sustainable solutions to address the health impacts of extreme and chronic heat on their tourism sectors. They and others in Asia and the Pacific can supplement existing actions through the application of tools, including the H.E.A.T. Framework, to apply further evidence-based approaches to build workforce capacity and enable environments to tackle extreme and chronic heat.

The tourism sector—with its economic significance and direct stake in the health of its workers and customers, and the condition of its environment—is well positioned to lead the transition to more sustainable, resilient, and evidence-based solutions to address extreme heat impacts.