Climate change could have a huge impact on ski resorts in Europe

This winter, the sight of grassy slopes at Australia's ski resorts has been the stuff of nightmares for skiers, snowboarders and mountain lovers.

It is also a stark reminder of the impacts that human-induced climate change is already having and a warning of what is to come, according to a study modelling the effects of a hotter world on ski resorts in Europe.

With about 50 percent of the world's ski resorts located in Europe, they are based on reliable and predictable snow cover.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that 53 percent of European ski resorts were at a very high risk of a lack of snow supply with less than 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

The report found that 98 per cent of resorts would be at very high risk with less than 4 C of warming.

Global temperatures are 1.2 C above pre-industrial levels, and an analysis from Carbon Brief suggests the world will reach 2 C of warming by 2038 and 2072 if emissions remain close to current levels.

The study's lead author, Samuel Morin, of France's National Centre for Meteorological Research, said the model did not account for geographical, elevation and regional differences.

We find that if we don't account for snowmaking, the conditions will get worse because there is a widening snow decline because of the warming, he said.

Morin said that very high risk was a metric based on how often bad seasons would occur rather than on average snow conditions.

What matters is how often they encounter challenging conditions like snow-scarce, snow-poor winters, and how frequently that occurs, he said.

It's a bit like a heatwave it doesn't matter much to say that the temperature has increased by one or two degrees locally, on average.

What we call'very high risk' is when we reach that shift from a once-in-five years event into once-in-two years events so basically going from 20 percent to 50 percent of the winters that have those challenging conditions. To shore up conditions at ski resorts, ski resorts can use artificial snow, but by doing so, water and energy use is increased.

The researchers utilized models to assess the potential impacts of artificial snowmaking and found that the practice could lower the number of resorts at very high risk to 27 per cent under the 2C mark and 71 per cent of those under 4C.

It would, of course, come at a cost.

It is about 20 percent higher water demand for 2 C global warming and 30 - 40 percent water demand increase for 4 C global warming.

The ski industry and governments had some big questions to consider, he said.

It goes way beyond the emissions caused by snowmaking, Morin said in a statement.

It's mostly transportation, it's mostly housing, and so that's the key issue that we point to in the paper as well how sustainable that is, and how ski resort managers, but also the authorities of those mountain areas combine adapting to climate change while also reducing emissions. Climate change in Australia has resulted in a long-term decline in the maximum depth and duration of the snow season since the late 1950s, according to the Bureau of Meteorology's 2022 State of the Climate report.

The report said that the largest declines came during spring and at lower altitudes.

The number of snowfall days has also decreased. The winter months have been rare due to the persistence of heavy snow cover. In response, Omar Elkadi, the head of the Climate Protection Our Winters climate group, said focusing only on snow depth could mask some of the bigger problems.

If you look at the snowfall rates say 50 years ago, we used to get a lot more smaller top-ups, which built the base over time.

It's been a year since we call them Snowmageddon, and recently, we get these massive fronts come through, and they drop a huge amount of snow, often because they're so strong.

Climate change, we're beginning to see that we aren't getting those smaller top-ups in between, so you have these booms and busts.

There will be great days to come, of course, but as they get hotter, the margins of error are becoming finer and finer.

Elkadi said 2023 could be the worst year in terms of snow depth since 2006, when Australia recorded its lowest depth on record.

But the low-altitude resorts were still struggling, he said, and Australian resorts have done a good job of managing the snow this year.

If you're out there about this year, ask a snow maker if you're out there about this year, because they have just had so few nights to pump out snow, because the wet bulb temperatures were too high, the humidity was too high, it was simply too warm.

That is the scariest thing for those low resorts because they can't actually rely on the snow-making sometimes, which is a pretty bleak outlook for some of those resorts. As in Europe, Elkadi said, how Australian resorts manage water and energy use was a big question.

Snow-making decreases the variability that we're going to get from climate change for the ski resorts so they can effectively operate in the right way and provide a product for their customers, he said.