Territorial Tourism Resilience in the Post-Earthquake High Atlas: A Conceptual Framework and Territorial Tourism Resilience Index (TTRI), Illustrated with the Cases of Imlil, Aremd, Talat n'Yaaqoub, Amizmiz, and Imi n'Tala, Morocco

Abstract

On 8 September 2023, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake struck Morocco's Al Haouz province, killing nearly 3,000 people and displacing roughly 500,000 residents. The disaster fell disproportionately on High Atlas communities whose rural economies depend on trekking and mountain tourism, yet post-disaster tourism research has generally evaluated sectoral recovery in isolation from the territorial systems, physical, institutional, social, and economic, that determine whether a place actually recovers. This paper develops a Territorial Tourism Resilience Index (TTRI): a six-dimension framework, Physical Territory, Tourism System, Community Capacity, Governance, Economic Performance, and Environmental Resilience, for assessing resilience at the territorial rather than the sectoral scale. Each dimension is operationalised into eighteen field-ready indicators, illustrated using verifiable secondary data across five High Atlas villages that shared a single shock but diverged sharply in outcome. The comparison shows that physical accessibility and governance coordination, more than tourism intensity alone, explain this divergence, yielding three distinct recovery profiles. These findings inform five territorial-planning recommendations covering road investment, governance coordination, and indicator-based regional planning. Converting the TTRI into a validated, scored index requires the fieldwork specified in Section 4.4.

JEL Classification: Z32; Q54; R11

Paper type: Theoretical Research