Climate changes melting tourism in Swiss Alps

BELALP and VERBIER, Switzerland

Over the centuries, Swiss mountain communities such as these have proven resourceful in adapting to natural adversities, and in recent decades, they have turned the Alpine beauty into a cash cow by promoting winter sports.

However, the fast pace of modern life is sending worrying signals in the form of dramatic changes in temperature and climatic conditions in the Alps that threaten the annual multimillion-dollar winter sports and tourism industry.

Fearing the worst, some Swiss policy-makers and business leaders are urging mountain communities to hedge against this risk by diversifying their economic activity into sports and ventures that are less dependent on snow.

One early warning sign that has the normally calm and reserved Swiss — such as Hanspeter Holzhauser, a Zurich-based geographer — on edge are the changes being recorded at the Jungfrau-Aletsch-Bietschhorn World Heritage site.

Alps are melting

This majestic region is dominated by roughly 150 square miles of year-round ice and snow.

Mr. Holzhauser, who has spent the last quarter-century monitoring and measuring the Aletsch glacier — Europe’s largest, with a length of more than 14 miles and a surface area covering 31 square miles — says that since the glacier reached its maximum length from 1859 to 1860, the tongue of the glacier — its downhill extremity — has receded by more than 2 miles, more than 70 feet per year.

He said the glacier’s tongue is approaching its minimum recorded length.

The geographer says that because glaciers are slow to reflect long-term climate fluctuations, the tongue would have to be hundreds of yards shorter than it is to reflect last year’s temperatures, he said.

Back to 1250 B.C.

Mr. Holzhauser fears that in view of global warming, “It is highly probable that in the near future — say, around 2050 — the glacier may shrink to its smallest size since the late Bronze Age, or even less.”

From 1250 B.C. to 1050 B.C., the Aletsch glacier was at least 1,000 yards shorter than it is today, he said.

Bruno Messerli of the Geography Institute at the University of Bern reckons that some of the driving forces behind the environmental changes detected in the Alps reflect the profound increase in economic activity worldwide.

According to academic studies, from 1890 to 1990, the world’s human population quadrupled, the world economy increased 14-fold, industrial output rose by 40 times, and energy use grew 13-fold, he said.

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