Camille Gonseth

Impact of snow variability on the Swiss winter tourism sector: implications in an era of climate change

With its numerous mountain regions and its well developed winter tourism infrastructures, Switzerland is a country whose tourism sector is known to be sensitive to snowpack variability. With climate change—which is predicted to have negative impacts on snow depths and duration—the need for accurately assessing the sensitivity of winter tourism consumption to changing snow conditions is reinforced. Taking advantage of newly available data on visitation rates at Swiss ski areas, we analyze the effect of snow conditions on skier visits using standard panel data regression techniques. We assume the magnitude of this effect to be conditional on the level of snowmaking investments. Higher snowmaking investments should lead to a lower sensitivity. Our results validate this hypothesis and also shed light on the competitive interactions between lower and higher lying ski areas located in the same tourism region. In fact, our results show that better snow conditions in the former reduces visitation rates in the latter. Eventually, we find that ski areas benefiting from sunny conditions tend to have, ceteris paribus, more skier visits. This suggests additional impacts if climate change were to modify sunshine duration in mountain regions.

Impacts of global warming on energy use for heating and cooling with full rebound effects in Switzerland

SummaryThis paper analyzes the impacts of the modified needs for space heating and cooling due to global warming on the quantities of energy used for space conditioning and overall. It thereby estimates direct and total rebound effects, the latter including changes in consumption and production triggered by changes in energy needs for space conditioning by households, services and industry. A computable general equilibrium model is used to simulate a range of climate and impacts scenarios for Switzerland over the period 2010–2060. We find significant welfare gains from reduced heating needs, exceeding largely the costs of the additional electricity needed for cooling. We also find large rebound effects. For instance, while the climate scenario A1b would allow households to reduce their consumption of fossil energy for room heating by 15.9 %, actual reductions are only 10.4%, which implies a direct rebound effect of 35 %. Economy wide, fossil energy consumption could decrease by 4.3% but does so only by 2.7%, which represents a total rebound effect of 37%.

A General Equilibrium Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on Swiss Winter Tourism with Adaptation

Winter alpine tourism has been repeatedly identified as one of the economic sectors most at risk from climate change in Switzerland. However, all of the costs that have been estimated so far for the Swiss tourism sector are, to some extent, misleading as they do not, or only partially, incorporate adaptation possibilities and general equilibrium effects. We attempt to fill this gap using a computable general equilibrium model that is specifically designed for the purposes of this research. Our modeling efforts first consist in creating a tourism sector with a part of it being dependent on snow. We also carefully model the snowmaking technology. Using climate change scenarios on future snow cover, we analyze their impacts on the Swiss ski industry. We find welfare effects for the Swiss economy ranging from − 23 to 113 million CHF in 2050. This range arises from the use of various assumptions concerning adaptation possibilities. We also show that geographical substitutions between international ski destinations have large positive effects for Switzerland. From a more general perspective, our results exemplify the risks of estimating the consequences of climate change based only on domestic impacts of climate change with no adaptation being implemented.