Climate Change and Ski Tourism Sustainability: An Integrated Model of the Adaptive Dynamics between Ski Area Operations and Skier Demand

Daniel Scott,Robert Steiger,Peter Johnson,Marc Pons,Michelle Rutty

doi:10.3390/su122410617

Daniel Scott, Robert Steiger + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su122410617

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Abstract

Climate change is an evolving business reality influencing the sustainability of ski tourism worldwide. A new integrated model of the co-evolution of supply (27 ski areas) and demand-side (skier behaviour) climate change adaptation in the ski tourism market of Ontario, Canada is presented. Ski area operations are modeled under a high-emission 2050s scenario, with skier responses to altered operations informed by a survey of 2429 skiers. These market adaptive dynamics reveal new insights into differential climate risk, capturing patterns not apparent when considering only operational conditions of ski resorts. A decoupling of ski season length and skier visitation was found at four ski areas, where, despite average season length losses, visitation increased as a result of reduced competition. Simulated skier visit losses were smaller than reductions in season length, contributing to an increase in crowding. Growing the market of skiers was also identified as a critical adaptation strategy that could offset skier visit losses from shortened seasons. Climate change challenges the future sustainability of ski areas in this market in several ways: profitability of ski areas with substantially shorter seasons, increased snowmaking costs, crowding impacts on visitor experience, and potential overtourism at the few most climate resilient destinations.

Highlights

Established tourism business models and livelihood strategies are challenged by climate change, which in turn may impede sustainable tourism development in regions with greater climate change risk or high dependency on climate-dependent tourism markets
This research takes a novel approach to modeling climate risk of ski tourism by combining multiple data inputs into an integrated geospatial model: (1) “SkiSim2.0”, a ski area operations model that utilizes daily climate inputs to simulate snow conditions and the operational status of ski areas; (2) an empirical skier survey with stated behavioral responses of skiers to closed ski areas; (3) ski area characteristics, including ski resort snowmaking and lift capacity used to consider the impacts of increased visitation on resort crowding; and (4) ski industry performance data to define the number of available skiers and seasonality of demand
Consistent with previous studies in this and nearby regional ski markets, climate change resulting from a high-emission scenario reduced the average ski season length in the 2050s and snowmaking requirements to limit season losses increase at all ski areas in cool and average seasons

Summary

Introduction

Established tourism business models and livelihood strategies are challenged by climate change, which in turn may impede sustainable tourism development in regions with greater climate change risk or high dependency on climate-dependent tourism markets. The multi-billion-dollar global ski industry is a climate-sensitive tourism market that has received considerable attention in the research literature [1,2], the media (see [3] for a critical review), and tourism organizations [4,5,6]. Climate change is an evolving business reality for the ski industry, with recent trends toward shorter and more variable ski seasons and emerging climate risk disclosure requirements. Future climate risk has received increasing attention from the financial markets and institutional investors (e.g., [10,11,12]). Much of the ski industry remains hesitant to publicly engage in climate action, emerging pressures for climate and carbon risk reporting [13,14]

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