Abstract:
Climate change negatively influences tourism development, and the rapid growth of tourism is also exacerbating climate change. Low-carbon tourism has become an important way to mitigate climate change. Exploring the low-carbon tourism behavior of tourists under the influence of climate change is important to promote the development of tourism in the direction of green and energy-saving, and is also in line with the goal of “dual carbon” construction, meeting the overall requirements of ecological construction. Taking the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) model as the theoretical framework, this paper used the World Natural Heritage site Wulingyuan as an example and conducted a web-based questionnaire survey on 450 target tourists by snowballing to explore the mechanism of the public’s perception of climate change (cause perception, risk perception, and adaptation perception) on their low-carbon tourism behavior. The empirical study found that: 1) In the context of climate change, tourists’ low carbon tourism willingness and behaviour were generally at a high level; 2) among the stimulus factors, climate change adaptation perception played a dominant role and had the deepest influence on tourists’ low-carbon tourism behaviour; 3) among the organism factors, tourists’ low-carbon tourism attitudes and willingness played a key central role in generating their low-carbon tourism behaviour; 4) among low carbon tourism behaviour, tourists were most likely to practice purchase based low carbon tourism behaviour, followed by reduction based low carbon tourism behaviour. Based on the results, suggestions were made to strengthen publicity and education, expand social participation and increase technical support, in order to provide a reference for the tourism industry to achieve the “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals”.