Bare ski slopes make for bleak climate view

The full extent of the climate crisis has been underlined by the decision to host next weekend's Ski World Cup at the Swiss mountain resort of Adelboden on artificial snow, as unseasonably high temperatures in some of Europe's most popular and lucrative winter sports regions have left slopes bare of snow and instead showing mud and grass to the world.

According to a 2020 article in Forbes magazine looking at how the sector was being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Alpine skiing industry is worth $33 billion each year, so its economic contribution to countries, including Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany, is enormous.

But this year, it is weather rather than the pandemic that is threatening to deal the winter sports sector a heavy blow.

On New Year's Eve, Switzerland's national weather agency MeteoSwiss recorded temperatures in some parts of the country to be 16 degrees higher than normal. And at the Jura Mountains resort of Delemont, a temperature of around 21 C was recorded.

"The climate is changing a bit, but what should we do here? Shall we stop with life?" Adelboden course director Toni Hadi told The Associated Press. "Everything is difficult."

France also ended a year that saw forest fires and record-breaking heat in the summer with some of the highest winter temperatures ever recorded, backing up evidence supplied by the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, earlier in the year, showing that the past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record.

The final global weather statistics for 2022 are due later this month, but data published by the WMO during the COP27 climate summit painted a bleak picture of the health of Europe's winter regions.

"In the European Alps, glacier melt records were shattered in 2022. Average thickness losses of between 3 and over 4 meters were measured throughout the Alps, substantially more than in the previous record year 2003," the organization said.

Glacier ice volume

"In Switzerland, 6 percent of the glacier ice volume was lost between 2021 and 2022, according to initial measurements …between 2001 and 2022, the volume of glacier ice in Switzerland decreased from 77 cubic kilometers to 49 cubic kilometers, a decline of more than a third."

Some Swiss resorts have opened up summer biking trails rather than relying on snow sports for their seasonal trade.

Even though snow cannons are being used to create artificial snow to allow skiing to go ahead, that too comes at an environmental cost.

The BBC reported that Europe's energy crisis had led to Switzerland trying to preserve water to focus on hydroelectric power, and a study by the University of Basel said increased use of artificial snow in affected regions could send water consumption up by as much as 80 percent.