Climate Change Threatens Alpine Resorts
It may not be the ski season, but alpine skiing and snowboarding may be under greater threat from climate change than scientists have previously thought, new research suggests.
A study of snowfall spanning 60 years has indicated that the Alps’s entire winter sports industry could grind to a halt through lack of snow.
It found a dramatic “step-like” drop in snowfall at the end of the 1980s which has never recovered. The average number of snow days over the last 20 winters is lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago.
Christoph Marty, from the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, who analysed the records. “I don’t believe we will see the kind of snow conditions we have experienced in past decades,” he said.