Jarkko Saarinen

Jarkko Saarinen is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oulu. His research interests include local and regional development, tourism and development, sustainability and resilience studies, tourism and climate change adaptation, tourism-community relations and nature conservation and wilderness studies.
He is Editor for the Tourism Geographies and Associate Editor for the Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Ecotourism, Development Southern Africa, and Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism. His recent publications include co-authored and co-edited books: Handbook on Tourism Governance (2025); Climate Change and Tourism in Southern Africa (2022, Routledge); Southern African Perspectives in Sustainable Tourism Management (2022, Springer); Tourism, Change and the Global South (Routledge, 2021), Resilient Destinations in Tourism (2019, Routledge) and Borderless Worlds for Whom? (2019, Routledge).
Since 2013 he has been a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. In 2013 he received the Association of American Geographer’s (AAG) Roy Wolfe Award for outstanding academic contributions to tourism geography and the Geographical Society of Finland’s Ragnal Hult Medal for the contributions to the geographical research and knowledge. He received the AAG’s John Rooney Award in 2020 for outstanding applied contributions to the discipline of tourism geography.