Regional ski tourism risk to climate change: An inter-comparison of Eastern Canada and US Northeast markets

Abstract

Climate change has become a business planning reality in the ski industry, with differential impacts and adaptive capacity important for intra- and inter-regional market competitiveness. Potential climate change impacts are examined at 171 ski areas in Ontario, Québec and the US Northeast using the SkiSim2 model with regional parameterizations of snowmaking capacity. With advanced snowmaking, mid-century season length losses are limited to 12–13% under a low emission pathway (RCP 4.5), increasing to 15–22% under high emissions (RCP 8.5). By late-century, low and high emission pathways diverge creating very different futures for the ski industry. Season length and skiable terrain losses increase only marginally in the low emission pathway, while transformational impacts occur under a high emission pathway, with only 29 ski areas in Québec and high-elevation areas of the US Northeast able to maintain a 100-day season and open regularly for the economically important Christmas-New Year holiday. A low emission future, where current national pledges to Paris Climate Agreement are achieved, is crucial to preserve the Eastern North America ski tourism marketplace. The results are compared with previous studies that have neglected the adaptive capacity of snowmaking and substantially overestimated the impact of mid-century and lower emission climate change scenarios.

Keywords:

• climate change
• ski tourism
• competitiveness
• snowmaking
• adaptation
• sustainable tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott is a University Research Chair and Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo and a Vice-Chancellor Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey. He has worked on the human dimensions of climate change for over 20 years and been a contributing author and expert reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third, Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports as well as the Special Report on 1.5 °C warming.

Robert Steiger

Robert Steiger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Finance, University of Innsbruck (Austria). His research interests are in the field of sustainable tourism development, climate change impacts on tourism and tourist behaviour. He has worked on climate change and tourism for over 10 years and has contributed to the national Climate Change Assessments of Austria (APCC) and Switzerland (CH2014).

Natalie Knowles

Natalie Knowles is a PhD researcher at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on sustainable tourism including climate change risks, adaptive capacity, decarbonizing tourism, biodiversity conservation, and community-based indigenous tourism.

Yan Fang

Yan Fang is a Faculty member in the School of Sports Recreation and Tourism, Beijing Sport University (China). Her research focuses on the sustainability of sport and sustainable tourism, in particular destination and tourist adaptation to climate change.