Climate-Resilient Coastal Tourism in India: A Systematic Review of GIS and Remote Sensing Approaches for Vulnerability Assessment and Sustainable Planning

Abstract

India's 11,098 km coastline supports beach, heritage, pilgrimage, and island tourism economies that are increasingly exposed to sea-level rise, cyclone intensification, and shoreline erosion. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) have become the dominant toolkit for assessing coastal vulnerability in India, yet the extent to which this evidence base has been translated into tourism-specific planning guidance remains unclear. This systematic review, conducted according to the PRISMA 2020 framework (Page et al., 2021), synthesises 68 peer-reviewed studies published between 2005 and 2025 that apply GIS/RS methods to coastal vulnerability assessment along the Indian coast. A structured search of Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and MDPI databases, supplemented by grey literature, identified studies which were screened against explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria and appraised for methodological quality across six dimensions. A quantitative synthesis of vulnerability classification outcomes from 34 studies reporting comparable indicator data was undertaken alongside a thematic classification of the wider literature. The review finds that although Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI) and Digital Shoreline Analysis System (DSAS) methods are well established and geomorphologically robust, fewer than eight percent of studies explicitly incorporate tourism-sector variables such as visitor density, seasonal occupancy, or hospitality infrastructure exposure, and fewer than one in five link vulnerability outputs to spatial planning or regulatory instruments such as the Coastal Regulation Zone framework. Machine-learning-assisted shoreline prediction is an emerging but still marginal methodological trend. The review develops a conceptual framework connecting geospatial vulnerability evidence to tourism planning and policy, and concludes with a ranked set of research priorities aimed at closing the gap between geospatial science and destination-level climate adaptation in India.