The IOC is due to award the WinterOlympics to either Stockholm or Milan. Last year we reported on how, thanks to climate and demographic change, winter sports are going downhill quickly
THE great limestone peaks of the Dolomites glow ochre and pink in the summer sunset. The slab of the Marmolada glacier, the “Queen of the Dolomites”, glistens a regal white. But get up close and the sovereign is weeping. Countless rivulets of meltwater stream down her face.
A more immediate worry for the winter-sports industry is that skiing and snowboarding have peaked in the rich world. Laurent Vanat, author of an annual report on snow and mountain tourism, estimates that the number of skier-days in the world’s main ski destinations fell from about 350m in the 2008-09 season to about 320m in 2015-16. This includes declines in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Italy and, most markedly, in fast-ageing Japan.
Skiing involved hours of hard climb on foot or skis for just a few minutes of downhill thrill. Its popularisation would have to await the introduction of mechanical ascent as well as the post-war economic boom. By then antibiotics had relieved the sanatoria of their tubercular residents, allowing them to become hotels. Under its “Snow Plan” of 1964, France created a network of high, purpose-built resorts to draw foreign tourists and prevent the depopulation of Alpine valleys.
The main response of resorts has been to invest heavily in artificial snow-making. Messrs Scott and Steiger have reworked climate-model assessments to take this into account. One looks at roughly 300 resorts in the vulnerable eastern Alps . Relying just on natural snow, about 70% of them would no longer survive with 2°C more warming, and 90% would be endangered with 4°C. But with snow-making these proportions fell to about 15% and 60% respectively .
In some places water really is scarce. The small Kaberlaba station in Asiago , in Italy, is on porous rock; water quickly drains away. Rather than make snow with expensive tap water, Paolo Rigoni, the manager, started to use treated municipal sewage in 2010, an idea for which he received a presidential prize. Customers do not mind skiing on recycled effluent, he insists: “It’s not that different from water treatment in some American cities.
Ski resorts are proliferating in China, including those in the Chongli district north-west of the capital that will host some of the sites for the Olympics in 2022. They are covered completely with artificial snow. This is despite the fact that the water table in Beijing has dropped alarmingly over the decades, and enormous diversion works are sending some of the Yangzi’s waters to the capital. In a warming world things here could get yet drier.
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