How Ski Resorts Are Adapting to Climate Change

About 90 minutes from Shanghai, there’s a new ski resort sprawling over nine square hectares. Its longest run is nearly a quarter mile with a 200-foot vertical drop, and the weather is a comfortable 26°F to 23°F. Always.

Outside, temperatures can soar to plus 86°F, but the L+Snow resort, which opened in September 2024, is the world’s largest indoor ski resort. It’s an energy-intensive way of dealing with the climate crisis’s effect on winter sports, requiring 72 cooling machines and 33 snowmaking machines to maintain optimal winter conditions under a roof.

Could this be the future of skiing? Or rather, does skiing have a future at all in a world that’s being lashed by climate change? It’s a major concern for resort operators, environmental researchers and, of course, winter sports enthusiasts witnessing rising temperatures and vanishing snow.

 

Last year, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, known as FIS, had to cancel 26 out of 616 World Cup races because of lack of snow and warm weather, prompting it to form a new partnership with the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to raise awareness that “winter sports and tourism face a bleak future because of climate change” unless more is done. In early 2023, 200 of the world’s top skiers sent a letter to FIS demanding more action on climate change, calling for a “geographically reasonable” race schedule with less intercontinental travel and a shift in the season to account for changing weather patterns.

“Climate change is, simply put, an existential threat to skiing and snowboarding. We would be remiss if we did not pursue every possible effort that is rooted in science and objective analysis,” FIS president Johan Eliasch said in a news release announcing the partnership in October.

According to WMO, global temperatures between January and September 2024 were 35°F above the pre-industrial average. “Ruined winter vacations and cancelled sports fixtures are–literally–the tip of the iceberg of climate change,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Retreating glaciers, reduced snow and ice cover and thawing permafrost are having a major impact on mountain ecosystems, communities and economies and will have increasingly serious repercussions at [the] local, national and global level for centuries to come.”

Ski Resorts Struggle to Make Up for Lost Snow

Around the world, ski resorts are scrambling to adapt. Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum holds its annual high-level talks about how the world is changing, is home to some of the planet’s best skiing and the longest-running series of high-altitude, day-by-day data on snow depth. The statistics show that since 1971, when the WEF first met in Davos, the area’s snowpack has thinned by more than 40%.

Davos and other areas have turned to snow farming–stockpiling natural snow when it falls to be moved to slopes and trails where the coverage would otherwise be too patchy. A 2023 study by French and Austrian scientists published in Nature Climate Change looked at 2,234 ski resorts in 28 European countries. The study found that without snowmaking, more than half of these resorts risk not having enough snow if global warming reaches 2°C–and nearly all will be wiped out if temperatures warm by 4°C.

“It’s not enough for individual resorts to act alone. The power is in education, advocacy and combining our efforts.”

– Geoff Buchheister, CEO, Aspen Skiing Company

Snowmaking can be of particular help to small mountains, in areas like Eastern Canada, where 76% of skiable terrain in Quebec and 95% in Ontario already have artificial facilities. But making snow is impractical at many larger sites such as B.C.’s Whistler Blackcomb, which has nearly 8,200 acres (3,300 hectares) to cover, says Daniel Scott, geography and environmental management professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo. 

“There’s a cost for the water, the refrigeration and moving the snow,” says Scott, who is also executive director of the Waterloo Climate Institute and a board member of Protect Our Winters, a global organization that’s amassing research into the future of snow sports and how to conduct them more sustainably.

The Climate Pros and Cons of Snow-Making

The great hurdle is reducing the planet-warming emissions involved in making all that snow. One study Scott conducted with colleagues in Innsbruck, Austria, found that the energy needed to produce artificial snow for resorts across Canada in one year equals the energy used by 17,000 homes, producing some 130,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases and using 43.4 million cubic metres of water.

Most of the water is returned to lakes, streams and the ground, but the energy required for all this snowmaking is about 478,000 megawatt hours. Scott says that the environmental impact of snowmaking can be lessened by improved technology, better water conservation and the conversion of electrical systems to renewable, lower- or zero-carbon grids. 

He adds that “snowmaking can actually help reduce total emissions from tourism when it enables millions of skiers to ski regionally instead of driving or flying to far-off ski resorts or selecting another type of carbon-intense holiday. Net-zero-compatible ski holidays are already possible in destinations like Quebec.” 

That said, smaller resorts tend to struggle with snowmaking costs, and only so much can be done when temperatures continue to hover above zero. Even a place like Ontario’s Blue Mountain, with a massive snowmaking system and access to Georgian Bay water, couldn’t open at Christmas in 2023 because of the weather.

How Ski Resorts are Diversifying–and Taking Action on Climate

Major resorts such Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico are going all out to lessen their carbon footprints, worrying about not only whether they can cover their slopes, but also how they can contribute less to the climate emergency that’s causing the snow decline. 

“We’re North America’s only certified B Corp ski resort,” says Dawn Boulware, vice president of environmental and social responsibility at Taos Ski Valley. (In France, the Les Arcs/Peisey-Vallandry area was certified in 2023.) This is the certification given by non-profit B Lab for companies committed to environmental stewardship and social responsibility. 

“We became carbon-neutral in 2022, we’ve electrified or are electrifying all our on-mountain buildings, use 100% solar energy in daytime and are testing an electric-powered snowcat groomer,” Boulware says. 

Even with snowmaking, the prospect of ski-free winters looms large.

“There is a basic playbook for how ski resorts continue in a warming world,” says Auden Schendler, senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen One in Colorado, which operates four mountains: Snowmass, Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands and Buttermilk. Beyond increasing their snowmaking and water storage sustainably, he says that resorts need to “diversify into summer activities like mountain biking and hiking and offer winter activities beyond skiing,” he explains in an email interview.

 

Resorts of all sizes are taking measures to attract non-skiers year-round, adding attractions like luxury spas and promoting sales of pay-in-advance annual passes, to secure money up front no matter what the season is like. 

Knowing they face an uphill battle, Aspen One’s leaders are going beyond reducing the company’s footprint and using their lobbying power to push governments to take action against the very emissions that are putting their industry at risk. “We started lobbying Washington for climate action in 2004,” Schendler says. “We installed the first solar power array in the ski industry.” Aspen One also built the first electricity plant in the United States to run on biogas waste methane (that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere). 

“We need to fight the larger political battles. Our lobbying paved the way for huge supplies of renewables in Colorado today,” Schendler says. The resort’s parent Aspen Skiing Company is outspoken against actions it considers to be greenwashing, such as carbon offsets, and it produces a detailed annual sustainability report that it hopes will inspire others in the ski industry and the larger corporate world. 

“It’s not enough for individual resorts to act alone. The power is in education, advocacy and combining our efforts,” says Geoff Buchheister, chief executive officer of Aspen Skiing Company.

“Skiing does have a future–if we take action together.”

David Israelson is a writer, non-practising lawyer and communications consultant in Niagara-on-the-Lake.