A cold snap in France and reports that the country’s Alpine slopes have the deepest snow in the world might inspire hope after high temperatures last winter forced ski resorts to close. However, climate change research still predicts a bleak future for the Alps.
In the first days of 2024, the resort of Chamonix near Mont Blanc became the first base in the world to claim four metres of snow on its highest slopes – with French ski stations seeing their best January snow cover in recent years.
The news comes as a relief a year after Europe’s second-warmest winter on record dampened snow tourism.
But despite January’s flurries and low temperatures across France, meteorologists predict 2024 will be the hottest year on record – with climate concerns intensifying for the vulnerable Alpine region.
More snow than 2023
Last winter, no resort in France recorded four metres of snow before March.
La Sambuy, a small resort near Mont Blanc, dismantled its ski lifts in 2022 due to lack of snow, before deciding to shut permanently in 2023.
The highest ski station in the Pyrénées also closed last year due to financial strains caused in part by low snowfall.
Protect Our Winters Europe (POW), a non-profit organisation that campaigns to protect mountain environments, said record temperatures caused lower snowfall and earlier melts.
POW called the 2023 Alps season the “worst in living memory” and “a shocking glimpse into what awaits us in the future if radical action is not taken to mitigate climate change”.
Around 120 million people visit the Alps for winter sports and snow tourism every year, generating annual revenues of around 30 billion euros.
In France, some 120,000 jobs depend on the ski economy.
Climate change in the Alps
The alpine region is experiencing some of Europe’s strongest warming levels, with temperatures 0.6 degrees higher than the average for France, according to CREA Mont-Blanc, an organisation specialised in the study of natural mountain environments.
While climate change increases extreme snowfall at high altitudes, it also increases rainfall in low and medium altitudes, wiping out lower slopes at many ski resorts.
A 2021 study revealed the Alps has seen an average 8.4 percent decline in snow cover per decade since the 1970s.
Research by Nature Climate Change indicates that at 2C of warming, a third of resorts in the French Alps have a “very high level of risk of low snowfalls”.
For the Pyrénées, further south, that figure sits even higher at 89 percent.
At 4C, this risk level applies to 98 percent of all European resorts.
Wim Thiery, professor of climate science at the University of Brussels, told RFI's sister station France24: “By the end of the century [it’s] just going to be over ... skiing in the Alps as we know it.”
