Today, more than ever, communities need to develop resilience strategies to adapt to the varied and often unpredictable forces of global change. The focus of this collection of articles from Tourism Geographies is on global change in tourism places. Global change incorporates social and economic globalization, which is arguably the most important process to have shaped the development of modern tourism since the nineteenth century, and climate change, which is likely to be the most significant factor influencing human behavior and livelihood in the coming decades. The organization of these articles reflects a traditional geography approach, which starts with an emphasis the physical geography foundations of the human condition, especially through the issue of climate change. This is then broadened by a series of insightful comparative studies of how tourism communities react, adapt and relate to their changing natural and social conditions. This collection of papers addresses major issues and adaptive paths for tourism destinations as they face the challenges of our contemporary world. This book was published as a special issue of .