Does skiing have a future?

Snow was far from bountiful this week in Filzmoos, south of Salzburg

MATTHIAS SCHRADER/AP

Skiing came to the Alps in the 1880s but it took almost a century for the fashionable elite to make it their own, epitomised by the actress Brigitte Bardot in places such as St Moritz in the 1960s and 1970s. The mass market took off in the 1980s but the rise of skiing has coincided with climate change taking hold, which has caused average snow depth across Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Switzerland to fall by 8.4 per cent a decade between 1971 and 2019.

While human activity has driven up global temperatures by about 1.1C on average since the industrial revolution, the rate in the Alps has been almost double that — up to 2C in areas. This is partly because warming over land masses is greater than over the oceans but also because the Alps have seen more sun and less cloud, according to Robert Steiger at the University of Innsbruck.

At lower elevations, snowfall has always been highly variable from year to year. But there is still a clear downward trend as rain replaces snowfall, Samuel Morin, a research scientist at Météo-France, said. He has found that resorts at low elevation have lost about a month of ski season on average over the past 50 years, with the season starting about ten days later and ending 20 days earlier as melting begins. By comparison, in resorts at higher elevations of more than 2,000 metres, such as Tignes in France, there has been no major change.

Steiger noted that scarcity of snow was particularly painful for resorts because the Christmas holiday season typically makes up about a fifth of their turnover. The next fortnight will be key for this ski season, and the seven-to-ten day forecast for Switzerland suggests the mild temperatures of the past week will not drop. “If there is really no additional snow during the next ten days, and that’s how it looks, then we will definitely be on a new record low [for snow],” Marty said.

Looking ahead to 2050, low elevation resorts are expected to have between 10 and 40 per cent lower winter snow depth than in the early 21st century, regardless of how fast countries cut their emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those losses are inevitable because of warming already baked in by humanity’s past greenhouse gas emissions.

But what comes next depends on what happens to emissions in the coming decades. If they are low enough, the snow loss is not expected to worsen beyond 2050. If they are too high, snow loss could be between 50 and 90 per cent by 2100, compared to the start of the century. Morin estimates that for every 1C that global temperatures rise, the ski industry will lose about a month of natural snow on average. The world is on track for at least a 2.4C rise, enough to wipe out most of the winter season. He also notes that if such extreme warming came to pass, humanity will have more pressing problems than “being concerned with whether we can ski or not”.

While most European skiing takes place on snow atop grassland, some also takes place on glaciers, as happens at Zermatt in Switzerland. A high-emissions future would mean virtually all — 95 per cent — of Europe’s glaciers vanish by 2100, according to research by Harry Zekollari at ETH Zurich. Lower emissions could cut that loss to 37 per cent. “People say ‘it doesn’t really matter what we do on emissions.’ That’s not true. The decisions we take today, whether we have a green transition or not, will influence whether our great grandchildren at the end of the century will see a little bit of glaciers or nothing at all,” said Zekollari.

Artificial snowmaking is already used to reduce the negative impacts of climate change on ski tourism, the IPCC points out. Since 1990 the growth in the use of machines to make artificial snow, by spraying water to create snow-like balls of ice a few tenths of a millimetre in diameter, has masked the loss of natural snow for many skiers. Artificial snow is now used across all the major ski resorts and a growing number of smaller ones, Morin said. During the 2020-2021 ski season, about half of Swiss ski slopes were covered in artificial snow. While its use is expected to expand in future, obstacles remain: cost, water availability and the emissions from the energy it requires.

Ski towns and resorts are expected to have to diversify, looking to mountain biking, other activities and wellness tourism. That process has already begun in the past decade in smaller resorts at lower elevations, Marty said. “The ski industry has adapted over time. It’s been a flexible industry,” Klaus Dodds, dean for the school of life sciences and environment at Royal Holloway, said. He thinks milder winters offer an opportunity for resorts to move summer activities to winter. “You’re going to see more and more of ‘don’t wait for the summer, come and have a wonderful walk in the Alps in cooler temperatures and still see a bit of snow’,” he said.

Some ski areas will simply close, said Marty. He noted that, independent of climate change, there are already too many ski resorts because skier numbers are falling. Some places have started to removed decades-old infrastructure, such as the French village of Saint-Firmin uninstalling its ski-lift last November owing to a lack of snow.

Some towns have taken to protecting their glaciers — including the Rhone glacier in the Swiss Alps — by putting white blankets on them to reflect the sun’s energy and reduce melting. Zekollari said it works but has so many caveats that it is ultimately not a large-scale solution. “It’s really labour intensive, and really expensive. It will work, but it’s really small scale,” he said. Worse still, if the blankets are not removed by the end of the summer before unexpected snowfall, there is evidence of microplastics leaking into the environment.

A warming world will change where people ski. Even in a high-emissions future, skiing in Europe is not completely doomed, but it will become the preserve of resorts at high elevations, of 2,000 metres and up. “We will see a geographical shift,” said Steiger. “Skiers will congregate in the higher areas of the Alps, the inner regions of the Alps. Northern Switzerland, northern Austria, southern Germany will see fewer and fewer skiers. These are the skiers most vulnerable to climate change. But in St Moritz and Davos, snow would still be reliable at the end of the century.”

That means people will have to travel further from Europe’s biggest cities, increasing the cost of ski holidays. If people’s appetite for skiing remains high, this narrowing of supply also points to skiing becoming more expensive. Finally, greater reliance on artificial snow to offset reductions in natural snow indicates higher costs too. “One of the consequences of all this is skiing will once again become an activity for the most privileged, and charged accordingly,” Dodds said.

For ice and snow scientists who have often grown up with a passion for skiing, the impacts of climate change have become increasingly personal.

Zekollari said he was shocked by glacier loss in the last century. His colleague and IPCC author Reto Knutti tweeted a Near Year’s Day photo of slopes above the Swiss town of Gstaad, where he had learnt to ski in the 1970s. “Back then scientists had evidence that fossil fuel causes warming,” he said. “Climate science is my profession, but this is where it gets personal. When do we understand that we need to change?”