ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the situation in one high-risk location, the small town of Zipolite on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. It focuses on how climate change adaptation policies portray and evaluate the environmental risks that jeopardise tourism development and create environmental fragility and damage. The chapter aims to provide empirical support for the idea that environmental damage is the result of dynamic pressures linked to Mexico's state-led tourism development. Even though the pressure and release model is widely used to describe the importance of social factors in risk analysis, the effort to critically discuss dynamic pressures is less common. The conflict started in Zipolite in 1976 when the few families that had settled at the eastern end of the beach reclaimed a plot to build a school. The initial response of the government was violence, but once the conflict reached the national news the federal government backed off.
