Across the American West, skiers and snowboarders have collectively been praying for snow without much luck this season. To say it’s been a slow winter is putting it lightly. Outside went so far as to claim, “this is literally the West’s worst winter in 60 years.” And while there is, in fact, a major storm due to offer some relief this week, the toll that canceled vacations and weekend trips to the mountains have already wreaked on local economies may prove difficult to bounce back from before season’s end.
It doesn’t take an economist to point out that weather is a major economic driver for ski resorts – good snow years attract more visitors requiring more staff, and the opposite is true in a bad year. But a new report from the Colorado-based climate advocacy group Protect Our Winters (POW) suggests that slow winters are costing the ski industry more than $1 billion and 17,400 jobs.
“In mountain towns across the United States that rely on winter tourism,” reads the report, “snow is currency.”
On the flip side, POW found that good snow years saw $692.9 million in value added and 11,800 extra jobs.
The implication here, of course, is that the increased volatility of weather patterns as a result of climate change, and steadily increasing global temperatures are having a devastating economic impact on the US snowsports industry.
The report goes on to model low emission and high emission scenarios into the future that point to a particularly bleak future. Under a higher emission scenario, POW concludes that the average snow season (November–March) temperature increase will exceed 9°F in the Northern and Southern Rockies, and the White Mountains in Arizona and Southern Colorado could experience a 95 percent reduction in snowfall by 2080. In other words, major winter recreation zones could theoretically wither away in a little less than three generations.
On the whole, POW’s report underscores what winter recreationists and ski industry types already knew, but what would a report be if it galvanized readers to action without actionable strategies?
The “POW Climate Activists Roadmap” offers seven strategies for individuals to take action: find your biggest way to influence, get political, educate yourself, speak up, talk to businesses, change your habits, and make monetary contributions to science (for more info head to page 52).
“We know the facts,” concludes POW’s report, “and need not lay them out again here in detail: snowfall is diminishing, and the economic consequences are severe. The rising monetary toll is dwarfed by the emotional insult of a lifestyle in decline.”
