Antonio Broto |
Val de Travers (Switzerland) (EFE).- The scarcity of snow this winter season in Switzerland, which has forced many ski resorts to open late or remain closed, has deepened concern in the country about climate change, which threatens to endanger one of its main tourist attractions.
Small resorts in the country, such as Val de Travers, in the Jura mountains close to the border with France, have not been able to open their slopes to skiers at this point in February: at the foot of the slopes, where numerous stones and clearings the white cloak of snow, the station manager, Vincent Bouquet, is very pessimistic.
“We may have to close the station in winter, we have been focused mainly on summer activities such as mountain bikes or hiking for about 20 years,” he comments to EFE and indicates that they foresee 80% less income in the winter season due to to the increasing difficulty to open in those months.
The Val de Travers resort, with 13 slopes and 20 skiable kilometers, opened in 1969 initially only for winter activities, but two decades later it also began to operate in summer and little by little the hottest months have become its main tourist season.
More than a decade with little snow
Bouquet calculates that the less cold winters, with unstable snowfall, have affected the station for 10 to 15 years, with a maximum elevation of 1,400 meters, to the point that “in winter financing is difficult and it has become the station more difficult to overcome.
“In the face of bad conditions, there is (public) aid, but it is not guaranteed and there are certain criteria that must be met,” he says.
This winter has been especially difficult for the pre-Alpine and Jura ski resorts in Switzerland: after a tremendously warm December, which forced half of the Swiss ski resorts to be closed during the Christmas season, the cold and snow arrived in January, but in recent days the sun has returned and temperatures have started to rise again, threatening the smaller resorts once again.
The Alps concentrate 40% of global ski tourism, but they are also one of the most vulnerable environments to climate change, and for this reason their very livelihood is in danger.
Experts warn that all the glaciers in this part of Europe could disappear by 2100.
For its part, Switzerland receives around 10 million foreign visitors each year -with mountain tourism as the star attraction- and its ski resorts employ 17,000 workers. The winter sports tourism industry accounts for 1% of the country’s GDP.
The pandemic left misleading figures
The good figures of recent years, in which a record number of 25 million national and foreign visitors was achieved in the country’s resorts, are welcome, but they do not make us forget that the Alps will lose 26% of their glacier mass from here to 2100.
This even if the objectives of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change are met and the increase in temperature is limited to 1.5 degrees.
The figures for 2021 and 2022 also benefited from the fact that Swiss resorts remained open during the pandemic, unlike what happened in neighboring countries such as France or Italy, which caused many foreign skiers to choose Switzerland as their destination.
The lack of snow can be supplied in some resorts with cannons that produce it artificially, but this requires a high cost of electricity and water which, by reducing profitability, can make small resorts no longer sustainable as a business.
To make matters worse, the use of these snow cannons, at a time of growing climate activism, is seen as wasteful in the midst of the climate emergency and this winter groups that militate for this cause, such as “Rebellion Extinction”, have attacked machinery of this type in Switzerland and France.
Given this, the Swiss Ski Lift Association, which brings together the operators of ski resorts in the country, has presented the data that the sector only consumes 0.34% of all energy nationwide.
With around 20 million visitors to its 90 ski resorts, Switzerland is the fifth largest ski destination in the world, behind only the United States, France and Austria (with 50 million each) and Italy (28 million). .