The future of ski resorts in the Swiss Alps: using DMDU to identify tipping points

Abstract

<p>The future of ski resorts in the Swiss Alps is highly uncertain. Being dependent on snow cover conditions, winter sport tourism is highly susceptible to changes in temperature and precipitation. With the observed warming of the European Alps being well above global average warming, snow cover in Switzerland is projected to shrink at a rapid pace. Climate uncertainty originates from greenhouse gas emission trajectories (RCPs) and differences between climate models. Beyond climate uncertainty, the snow conditions are strongly subject to intra-annual variability. Series of unfavorable years have already led to the financial collapse of several low-altitude ski resorts. Such abrupt collapses with a large impact on the regional economy can be referred to as climate change induced socio-economic tipping points. To some degree, tipping points may be avoided by adaptation measures such as artificial snowmaking, although these measures are also subject to physical and economical constraints. In this study, we use a variety of exploratory modeling techniques to identify tipping points in a coupled physical-economic model applied to six representative ski resorts in the Swiss Alps. New high-resolution climate projections (CH2018) are used to represent climate uncertainty. To improve the coverage of the uncertainty space and accounting for the intra-annual variability of the climate models, a resampling technique was used to produce new climate realizations. A snow process model is used to simulate daily snow-cover in each of the ski resorts. The likelihood of survival of each resort is evaluated from the number of days with good snow conditions for skiing compared to the minimum thresholds obtained from the literature. Economically, the good snow days are translated into the total profit of ski resorts per season of operation. Multiple unfavorable years of total profit may lead to a tipping point. We use scenario discovery to identify the conditions under which these tipping points occur, and reflect on their implications for the future of snow tourism in the Swiss Alps.</p>