Tom Eagar: Snow dilemma
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Spring has sprung early in the French Alps this year. In Val d’Isere – from where I’m writing this – it's been pretty damn hot with recent temperatures reaching up to 21 degrees centigrade: highs only usually reached in late May.
France, and Europe as a whole, has had a particularly poor winter season in terms of snowfall too. Compared to the 2008/9 season, the snow base on the upper slopes of Val d’Isere are 59cm thinner as of April 9. We had only 30cm of fresh snow during the whole of January - pretty rare for one of France’s highest and most snow-sure resorts.
So, the unseasonal dry spell got me thinking: is this somehow our collective fault? And is it even possible to enjoy the alpine environment without damaging it?
The Earth has already warmed almost one degree centigrade since pre-industrial levels as a result of man-made climate change, and as it continues to warm, snow cover will decline, melt sooner and glaciers will continue to recede. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration compiled a report in 2009 detailing the evidence for these changes.
Between 1972 and 2000, spring melting has occurred on average two weeks earlier in the Northern Hemisphere. According to the Benfield UCL Hazards Research Centre, up to half of alpine snow cover could be gone by the year 2050, with many low-lying resorts such as the legendary Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia being in danger of closing.
Here’s where the catch comes in - you can’t snowboard without snow, but in order to snowboard you must contribute to global warming, thereby reducing snow cover and limiting the areas that you can ride. Take your bog-standard, one-week snowboard holiday as an example of carbon emissions: your travel to the airport, your flights, your transfer, the transport of food and other goods up to your resort, the power needed to run your chalets or hotels, the electricity needed to run your chair lifts and the energy required to power snow cannons (which can be up to 25% of a resorts operating costs). All of these emissions are helping to push the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere towards the critical 350 parts per million that scientists say is the upper safe limit to avoid runaway climate change and devastating environmental destruction.
So, if the winter travel and sports industry wants to survive, it simply has to adopt a sustainable, eco-friendly approach with companies and individuals minimising the carbon footprint of their holidays as much as possible.
But would switching to 'green' energy such as wind farms, solar energy and hydroelectric power be possible? The resort of Aspen Snowmass in Colorado has taken steps in the green direction. The resort has led the way in sustainable energy production and environmental programs. Aspen boasts the ski industry’s largest solar photovoltaic system plus a small hydro-electric power plant and they’re developing a site to house 1.7 megawatt wind turbines to boot!
It seems that the mountains certainly provide many of the natural resources for developing 'green' energy, but they have their problems too. For instance, many resorts lie within specially-sanctioned national parks, if not just areas of outstanding beauty, making the building of large wind turbines, solar panels and dams very undesirable if not politically impossible. Perhaps then, households and buildings within a resort could generate their own clean energy with solar panels and personal turbines? George Monbiot however, has pointed out the flaws with certain types of micro power, particularly personal wind turbines. Monbiot claims that the energy generated from these methods wouldn’t be enough to power a standard household.
In that case, perhaps the only option is to cut down on energy use and waste? But how?
Well, holiday companies and resorts should start by encouraging guests to reach the resorts by more environmentally-friendly forms of transport. One such resort taking positive steps is Werfenweng in Austria. As one of the only European resorts to offer carbon-neutral holidays, Werfenweng follows the concept of soft mobility that encourages environmentally-friendly forms of transportation to and within the town. If holidaymakers travel to Werfenweng by train, they are rewarded with something called a Samo card that gives them access to a range of free transport options around town such as cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing, bio-fuel cars and electric bikes.
Resorts should also sign up to 1% For The Planet, an organisation whereby companies pledge to donate one percent of their net profits to environmental organisations. Even the simple idea of reduce, reuse, recycle taken on a company-wide scale is a massive step in the right direction.
Initiatives like this are what are needed if progress is to be made, but skiers and snowboarders must also be engaged on a personal level. So if you want to protect your snow, take action. And it just so happens that there are many organisations that can inform you on low carbon, sustainable living.
The most apt of these is Protect Our Winters, founded by Jeremy Jones. This non-profit organisation was set up in 2007 and has a “common goal of reducing climate change’s effects on our sports and local mountain communities” by focusing on “educational initiatives, activism and supporting community-based initiatives that have tangible results”.
Low Impact Living is a website that allows you to calculate the impact that your lifestyle has upon the environment and ways that you can reduce it. Snow Carbon helps holidaymakers find the cheapest and easiest ways of travelling to European winter resorts by train, which could cut the carbon footprint of your journey to the slopes by 90%. Save Our Snow also provides information on green transport options and holiday tour operators. There’s also a great blog called Snowboard Green that features environmentally aware snowboard products with the shared aim of slowing climate change by helping people to buy items that will minimise any damage inflicted on the environment that comes from their production.
Ultimately, the winter travel industry as a whole needs to put the environment first and holidaymakers' interests second. Without the former, the latter just wouldn’t exist. It will be our attitudes today that define our lifestyles tomorrow.
So please, make a change and don’t help destroy what you love.
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Snow dilemma (text) by Tom Eagar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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