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Sustainability of Winter sports

Many people travel to the mountains to go skiing. Debate about how this influences climate change has been going on for years now. Covering the glaciers with skilifts must have some negative effects, right? Our fanatic skier Meike will explain it all. Text & Images: Meike van Heldoorn

The winter sports holiday still seems to be far away. However, it might be closer than you think. As a little girl, it has always been my dream to ski on my birthday. Being born in August does not really help with this. Last year, however, my dream came true. I was at the Hintertux gletcher in Austria, and exactly 3 slopes were open there on the 6th of August.

Global warming is a problem known to all of us. Skiing is generally not seen as the most “environmentally friendly sport”, since the building of ski resorts results in a lot of damage being done to the natural habitat of the mountains. Trees are cut down to create ski slopes, water is used to make the snow more suitable for skiing and fossil fuel energy is used for, for example, the ski lift. When you go skiing, you see that a lot of ski resorts already try to do something about this. Solar panels are placed on the ski lifts and the restaurants, wind turbines are placed on top of the mountain and small hydro turbines are used to supply renewable energy.

Yet, there is also another side of this. If we keep treating the environment the way we are treating it right now, all the glaciers will melt. However, when I was on the glacier in August last year, there was still a lot of snow. The fact that ski resorts make sure that there

is still enough snow on the slopes in August, also takes care of the glacier in a way. If the ski resort would close, no attention to the glacier would be given, and no trouble would be done to conserve the glacier. Then they might have been melted a little further already.

Of course, we are now talking in “what if” scenario’s. We would never know what would happen if we just let the glaciers be. However, if it would be the case that the glaciers melt, we might have a big problem. Altogether, there is more than five million cubic miles of ice on earth. Imagine the sea level rising…

All in all, I am happy that my dream came true and that the glaciers are still there, whether or not that is because of the conservancy of the ski resorts, or because global warming is going slower than we think. But the next time someone ecologically shames you because you can go skiing, you can explain that there are more sides on this story.