'Melting away': Climate change could kill skiing in the Alps
An industry that relies on snowfall could be a lot more outspoken about global warming.
VIENNA — Heat and snow mix like oil and water, which makes it all the more confounding that Austria's winter tourism industry appears to be in denial about the existential threat it faces from the burning of fossil fuels.
“The average altitude of ski areas in the Alps is approximately 1,800 meters. At 3 degrees of warming — 0.6 degrees per 100 meters — the viable zone shifts upward by 500 meters to 2,300 meters," University of Vienna ecologist Stefan Dullinger, speaking in German, recently told reporters in the Austrian capital. "Switzerland still has enough terrain at that altitude. Austria doesn't."
"As space shrinks and everything shifts upward," he continued, "the overlap and competition for an ever smaller area will become greater and greater."
From 1920 to 2020, snowfall across the Alps dropped by an average of 34 percent, according to a 2024 study published by the International Journal of Climatology, with the biggest declines reported below 2,000 meters.
If that trend continues, it will mean not just fewer opportunities for the average tourist, but further ecological damage, Dullinger noted. While ski operations are moved to formerly pristine areas, lower-altitude slopes will be abandoned and left devastated, discouraging climate-adaptive uses of the land, with hikers and others moving on to new terrain themselves.
"If you level a ski slope, mechanically shave off all unevenness — there are studies in Switzerland, over 10 to 15 years, showing no meaningful vegetation recovery at all," he said. "It simply degrades. It is never good."
Yet, for many in the country's alpine tourism industry, the fact that their livelihoods may well be destroyed by climate change does not seem to register. A year after the study reporting dramatic declines in snowfall, two of Austria's largest ski resorts, KitzSki and SkiWelt, merged and announced major expansion plans — below 2,000 meters.
As University of Vienna sociologist Valentina Ausserladscheider discovered, avoidance — refusing to accept that global warming is not a distant threat but something well underway — is a way to cope with the fact that there is no simple replacement for a winter sport industry that turned sleepy, impoverished towns into global destinations.
"A viable economic alternative, a big one, won't exist," the CEO of a cable car company told her, as she reported in a 2025 article for The Sociological Review, when asked what life in the Alps will be like when artificial snow can no longer make up for declines in the natural variety. “Agriculture won’t be enough ... Industrialization won’t happen either. And then we are left with depopulation because there will be too little work without tourism.”
For many, it seems better just not to think about what is still perceived as a future problem. Reality, however, will persist. So too will skiing, even in Austria — just not for most people.
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Speaking to reporters gathered at Vienna's foreign press association, Ausserladscheider, speaking in German, argued that Austria's ski industry should use its collective voice and its cultural power to demand action on climate change. Solar panels and more carbon-neutral transit are fine, but in the absence of real advocacy amount to little more than small gestures in the right direction.
"What is not happening ... is the clear communication that climate change is a massive problem for the industry," Ausserladscheider said. “If we really want to imagine a development where climate change does not fundamentally change our way of life, then we have to turn all political and economic screws — and if not the climate change-vulnerable industries, then who else?"
The future, at least for skiers in Austria, will also be a lot more segregated. When warmer temperatures eliminate winter sports at lower altitudes, what will be left are the economic elites at the top.
"We can see the trend," Ausserladscheider said. "Towards higher prices. Towards luxury. And that, of course, quite clearly prevents skiing, if it ever could be, [from being described] as a popular sport."
For there to be a chance at arresting the spike in global temperatures and ensuring a mass-market ski industry can exist past 2050, the stewards of Austria's traditional tourism industry should not remain on the sidelines of political debate.
"Those," she added, "whose entire economic system is melting away: if they don't say climate change is a problem, then I see our future as somewhat problematic.”
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