How does the future of ski resorts look in the face of climate change?

Last season, once again, the weather brought serious challenges to the Alps. High temperatures and rain reduced snow over New Year; a dry spring brought little snow until just before Easter. Some estimates suggest that by 2050, many ski resorts lower than 1,200 metres will have to rely entirely on snow-making machines if they want to avoid adding to the pile of abandoned ski lifts beginning to litter the mountains. Since the 1970s, records show Alpine snow cover overall declining by 5.6% per decade, and snow depth by more than 8.4%. While global action is needed to tackle climate change, the ski industry has been galvanised into action after seeing first-hand some of its earliest effects.

“There are many fantastic examples within the ski world of companies and people taking action to reduce carbon emissions, the main cause of rising global temperatures,” says Charlie Cotton, the founder of carbon-measuring company Ecollective, which helps businesses measure and reduce their carbon footprint. But he warns: “We need more businesses committing to reducing their yearly emissions and we need those already doing so to ramp up the amounts they’re currently reducing their footprint by.”

Impending loss of income is a strong incentive. Christmas, one of the most lucrative times of year, is no longer reliably ‘white’ in the mountains, as snowfalls shift to later in the season. Resorts are marketing themselves as year-round destinations to make up for the shortfall, but with travel and flights the main source of emissions, tour operators are realising they must do more.

In July, Eurostar announced its decision to discontinue its direct ski train from this season, citing Brexit border issues and the need to focus on core routes. Travellers can still connect through Paris or Lille but no-fly options have shrunk for Britain’s skiers to the Alps. And flying accounts for around 80% of a ski trip’s carbon footprint. “Over the next five years, the key change we need is a dramatic increase in people who either take the train, coach or travel in electric vehicles to ski resorts,” says Ecollective’s Charlie Cotton.

Some companies are already driving that change. “We’re not — yet — getting calls from consumers asking for the most sustainable holidays,” says Craig Burton, of Ski Solutions, which last winter launched a series of train travel packages to the Alps. “But as operators with a long-term interest in safeguarding the Alps, it’s our responsibility to set the agenda by encouraging clients to travel by train, to the most environmentally conscious resorts.”

In-resort eco initiatives are more established. Club Med, for example, created a sustainability department as far back as 2005 and is working to reduce energy and water consumption and install solar panels across all its resorts. Hotelplan, owner of ski specialist tour operators Inghams and Esprit, was an early signatory of the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism. Senior sustainability manager Krissy Roe says the company is “relentlessly committed to meeting carbon-reduction targets and establishing ourselves as a Nature Positive Business”.

France’s 238 ski resorts met in 2020 to agree on 16 eco commitments, including the target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2037, with zero CO2 emissions. They’re systematically working to dismantle disused ski lifts and rewild abandoned resorts. “France is the only country where all the ski areas have made a collective commitment,” says a spokesperson for Domaines Skiables de France, an association representing the French ski industry.

With temperatures rising in the mountains at twice the global average, resorts are moving infrastructure in preparation. Climate service Climsnow is working with resorts to model different scenarios based on rising snowline projections from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — resulting in beefing up snow-making systems and raising lifts and nursery slopes away from resort bases. To use less energy, all are employing GPS-aided slope grooming, rewilding areas and adapting ski lifts — and in Europe renewable energy is now the norm. 

Snow-making is no longer the panacea it was once considered to be. Snow canons account for 25% of a resort’s carbon emissions and they can’t operate in conditions that are warm (1C or above) or humid. Their energy and water requirements are so vast that researchers at Switzerland’s University of Basel have warned the potential 79% increase in demand for water in resorts below 1,800 metres could lead to conflict with local communities.

But Italy’s Dolomiti Superski area, an early adopter of snow-making back in the 1980s, is working with its suppliers to optimise technology.“Snowguns today produce the same amount of snow as those first models but with less than half the water and power,” says the area’s spokesman, Dr Diego Clara. “Almost everyone in our valleys depends on snow tourism — hotels, gastronomy, ski schools, rentals, shops, etc — and the cold days of autumn are becoming fewer in number and also come later.”

But it’s snow groomers rather than canons that are most polluting: up to 60% of a resort’s emissions come from piste-grooming machines, and resorts are now racing to convert the vehicles to HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) to cut emissions.

But with warmer winters, fluctuating temperatures and stronger winds come avalanches, and all this high-tech equipment and infrastructure — from lift pylons to solar panels — is vulnerable to higher numbers of wet, heavy avalanches, says Val d’Isère-based snow and avalanche expert Henry Schniewind. 

But there’s a positive outcome: “Despite the increasingly unpredictable weather and higher number of avalanches as temperatures rise, there are fewer accidents, largely because the danger is more predictable.”

Being strategic and adaptable is the key to ski-season survival. Diego Clara, from Dolomiti Superski, puts it succinctly: “The more time passes, the more we’ll seek new strategies for the winter as thousands of families depend on this and only tourism gives people the possibility to live stably in their alpine valleys.”