Sustainability of snowmaking as climate change (mal)adaptation: an assessment of water, energy, and emissions in Canada’s ski industry

Climate change exacerbates snow-water-energy challenges for European ski tourism

“…Our results are also relevant in the context of strengthening EU regulations on climate risk disclosure for all sectors. For planning purposes, such information relevant to the challenges of the ski tourism supply side (operating conditions) needs to be combined with future trajectories on the ski tourism demand side (i.e., skiers preferences and potential changes in practices), which are also heavily dependent on snow conditions and broader socio-economic perspectives including the diversification of mountain economies and avoiding maladaptation [1,6,7,19,27,44,47,48].…”

“…This holds implications for tourism development strategies. In particular, it remains questionable whether far-reaching policies required to limit global warming to +2 • C are compatible with carbon intensive tourism activities in their current form, in particular regarding transportation, housing, and the carbon intensity of electricity production [7,19]. Even if a substantial fraction of European ski resorts is projected to still be able to operate at 2 • C global warming, the ability of ski tourism destinations, as a whole, to achieve their share of greenhouse gas emission reductions required to remain below this global warming level is a major challenge.…”

“…Assessing the extent to which past and future changes in climate affect ski resort operations across Europe is critical to design meaningful development pathways for this key sector of the European tourism industry [4], particularly in the context of the European Green Deal [5]. This concerns both climate change adaptation and mitigation [6], and needs to take into account related pressures on the local environment and resources such as water and energy [7]. Indeed, ski tourism faces complex and intertwined sustainability challenges in the context of global change [8,9].…”

“…Snowmaking, by contrast, is primarily designed to reduce the snow supply risk to ski tourism by decreasing the frequency of snow scarce conditions on ski pistes through the addition of machine-made snow [14,18,19,23]. There are multiple interactions between snowmaking, the local climate (snowmaking can only proceed if the temperature remains sufficiently low), the local environment (water ressources, local ecosystems), the broader socio-economic functioning of ski tourism within mountain areas, and the influence of ski tourism on the climate through greenhouse gas emissions [7,14,18,19,23] (see Figure 1). Europe (see Figure 2 for the included mountain ranges) is the largest global ski tourism market, with about 50% of the world's total ski resorts and over 80% of the world's ski resorts with more than 1 million skier visits (i.e.…”

Die another day: explanations based on qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) for the survival and non-survival of isolated ski lifts in Switzerland

“…[and] that investment no longer improves profitability even in the worst snow season" (Cognard et al, 2023:12). Especially when considering the ambivalence of snowmaking as an insurance policy against advancing climate change on the one hand and as a business and ecological problem on the other (especially with regard to the high consumption of water and energy; see Knowles et al, 2023), the finding of Berard-Chenu et al (2022a) that political influence also plays a major role when it comes to the acquisition of snowmaking -with regard to both permits and loan awardscomes as no surprise.…”