Skiers in the European Alps are likely to face increasingly bare slopes by the end of the century due to climate change, a report has warned.
A new study by German and Swiss scientists found that there could be 42 per cent fewer snow days a year if greenhouse gases go unchecked.
The study, first reported in The Times newspaper, examined open source maps of downhill pistes and modelled how snow cover could change by 2071-2100 under three possible scenarios of future emissions.
The model predicted that the Australian Alps are expected to be the worst hit, with a 78 per cent fall in snow cover days, while the European Alps face a projected 42 per cent decline.
That would mean 80 fewer snow cover days annually, leaving just 137 a year on average.
“Our results clearly show a negative feedback loop of human actions leading to a rapidly changing world, in the form of natural snow loss in current ski areas," Veronika Mitterwallner, of the University of Bayreuth, which led the research, told the paper.
The team said it was the first study to take a global look at how snow cover will change in many places popular with skiers.
Under the highest emissions considered in the study - where global temperatures rise by 3.6C by 2100 - 13 per cent of ski areas worldwide would lose all their annual snow days by the end of the century.
The study, published in the journal Plos One, said skiable areas would increasingly only be found at the highest elevations.
Last month, a Swiss ski resort, Dent-de-Vaulion in the Jura Mountains, reported being left deserted after unusually mild weather melted snow on the slopes.
Switzerland, a major ski destination, is warming at about twice the global average rate partly because its mountains trap heat, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a report.
January was exceptionally warm, with temperatures hovering more than 2C above the average between 1990 and 2020, said MeteoSwiss, the country's federal office for meteorology and climatology.
"We are beating records so often that it doesn't feel extraordinary anymore when it actually is," said Christophe Salamin, a meteorologist at MeteoSwiss.
