Winter failed this year on the lower slopes of Europe’s Alps, prompting fresh orders for electric-powered machines that puff out artificial snow on to the pistes when the weather does not oblige.
Higher up the Alps, Europe’s highest mountain chain, there has been natural snow, but the melting of the great glaciers in the past couple of decades tells a clear story. The region’s climate has been changing.
As if to illustrate this, the central European winter this year was unusually mild. Mean temperatures in Germany in the three months from December to February were 4,1 degrees Celsius higher than the long-term average for those months since 1901.
Though meteorologists say it was just a freak winter, a debate is under way about the future of the winter tourism, the principal industry in the Alpine valleys of Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and France.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) late last year released a study that listed 609 Alpine ski regions that can count on ”enough” snow each year. Enough was defined as 30cm of snow on the ground for at least 100 days in the year.
The study said the year-round average temperature in the Alps had risen three times faster than the worldwide average over the past 25 years. The changes are dramatically visible to tourists.
On the slopes of Austria’s highest mountain, the Grossglockner, a viewing platform nowadays looks out over a bed of bare rock where 20 years ago motorists could admire the Pasterze, a deep river of glaciated ice.
Forecasting the impact of climate change, the OECD said that if the long-term average temperature in the Alps was to rise one degree Celsius, the tally of ski resorts would slip to 500. A rise of four degrees would leave only 200.
Shardul Agrawala, author of the study, said: ”Of all the countries we looked at, Germany is the most threatened.”
The figures suggest that 60% of the German resorts could be in trouble by the period 2020 to 2025, when the one-degree rise is expected. By the end of the 21st century, there might be only one German ski resort left, in the Alps above Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
To keep their businesses going, entrepreneurs throughout the Alps have bought snow cannons, machines which atomise water with compressed air, freeze it to snowflakes and blow it out onto the pistes. This man-made snow is then groomed by grading machines.
The cannons have mostly been used to whiten downhill slopes, but at Bayrischzell in Germany, tourist chief Harald Gmeiner is considering installing them along miles of cross-country ski pistes too.
The cannons have been criticised by environmentalists and the OECD, who say they are a wasteful use of valuable electricity and of water, which has to be either pumped uphill or collected in big reservoirs on the mountains.
Worse still, the machines often do not work: the temperature of the air has to be around freezing for them to function. This winter, even many of the nights have not been that cold, and the cannons have been idle.
Andrea Haendel, spokesperson for the German Alpine Club DAV, said, ”What we would like is for the tourist towns to stop thinking how much they can salvage by buying snow cannons and start thinking about what alternative activities they can offer to holidaymakers.”
Local authorities have shrugged off the criticism, often under public pressure to ”save” communities from impending ruin.
BN, a main Bavarian environmentalist group, says that is a big mistake.
”They should not be surprised if they are left looking at a green hillside, their money all gone and still no idea about how to encourage tourism activities that are not snow-dependent,” BN said.
Further south, in Austria, where 25% of the gross domestic product is estimated to derive from tourism, and where 30-million visitors are counted every year, the vanishing snows are mainly a danger to the lower-lying resorts.
The OECD estimates that even with drastic change at the end of this century, 49 of the existing 228 Austrian ski hills would still be in business.
In both Austria and Switzerland, high-altitude, year-round snowfields, which are technically glaciers, will also remain. Several are now being covered every summer with vast sheets of reflective foil to prevent the valuable winter-sports assets from melting in the sun. — Sapa-dpa