Ruapehu ski field crisis a climate change 'wake-up call'
Mount Ruapehus skifields may be the countrys first big business casualty of climate change , after a bad snow season followed a couple of tough trading years during Covid-19. Ruapehu Alpine Lifts, which operates the Whakapapa and Turoa skifields in the central North Island was this week put into voluntary administration to see if the business could be saved. The company is the largest employer in the region, with about 196 staff across the two ski areas. Turoa was forced to close for the season last week, three weeks earlier than planned, although Whakapapa is expected to remain open until Labour weekend. Climate change appears to be a significant factor after the country experienced the warmest winter on record for the third year in a row. Rain repeatedly washed away snow, with Turoas 50 snowmaking machines proving no match against the balmy temperatures. READ MORE: * Will climate change mean the end of the snowy weather? * New Zealand's South Island ski fields plan for warmer winters * Climate changing environmental approach to skifields Otago University associate professor Sara Walton, who specialises in sustainability and business, said she wasnt surprised by the news, noting that Covid had exacerbated and brought forward what probably would have happened anyway due to climate change. I dont think we can escape it as being an impact of climate change, as well as a lack of international tourists, she said. Its been quite a poor season in terms of snow and you need to have snow to have a ski field, so its kind of a fundamental issue there. It is a wake-up call for us to be really seriously thinking about our future. Walton said she was gobsmacked that Ruapehu Alpine Lifts, an organisation that relied on a natural resource affected by warming, had no mention of climate change in its latest annual report. She said companies needed to embed climate change into their organisation and the way it operated. I dont see the majority of companies doing that in New Zealand, she said. Theres a lot of companies that want to keep exploiting current conditions as long as possible and therefore are not building any resilience into their future thinking, she said. Some hadnt paid climate change much attention as they thought it would be a long time before they saw the effects, she said. But in reality, its probably not going to be. Climate change is already here. We are going to continue to see these impacts hitting us quite hard. If we don't start making the changes now, then the costs later are going to be even greater for businesses, for governments and for society in general. Waikato Management School professor Eva Collins, who specialises in sustainability, was also not surprised by the Ruapehu news. Covid has compounded the climate change, she said. They weren't going to get out of the climate change risk, but it probably put the climate change risk on steroids to add Covid to it. Collins said increasing demands for climate risk disclosure from companies would help drive behaviour. However while many New Zealand businesses had started, they were not where they needed to be. It was curious climate change hadnt been identified as a risk by the skifield operator, something which undergraduate students had been concerned about some years ago when using the company as a case study, she said. Having younger people represented on company boards would help raise awareness of such issues, she said. While the company had recently developed the Sky Waka gondola, which could be used year round, it needed to invest in alternative revenue sources sooner, she said. Even the scientists have been surprised about how soon and how much we're seeing the impacts, she said. People thought we were going to be planning for 10 years from now. Well, that's not happening. These are impacts that we're seeing right now. Professor James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University said that as temperatures increase in New Zealand, skiing would become more untenable. While there would always be changes from season to season, the trend was for warmer winters, he said. Ive told the North Island ski operators more than once that things are going to become marginal fairly quickly, he said. The further south you are and the higher up the mountains you are, the colder it is, so the longer you can keep going. The crisis facing the North Island ski fields shows that they are more vulnerable to climate change than those in the south, said Otago University professor of tourism James Higham, who supervised a PhD on the subject by Debbie Hopkins in 2013. There will certainly be a redistribution of skiers, he said. It's likely that the southern ski fields will benefit from the increasingly marginal and tenuous circumstances of first the Australian and then subsequently, the North Island, and then ultimately, certain South Island ski areas, he said. Adaption to climate change is going to be crucial. Higham said there were also likely to be tough times ahead for the southern ski fields which needed to invest in snowmaking and then look at diversifying into new markets such as mountain bike parks in non-winter months, and expansion into areas such as conferences which could use their facilities. The ski industry is estimated to be worth $1 billion to $1.5b to the New Zealand economy in direct and indirect spending. This season, a lot of that cash has been spent in the South Island as skiers from the North Island and Australia have headed to the mainland in search of snow. Higham said that had resulted in extremely crowded southern ski fields this year and raised concerns about their capacity. NZSki, which runs the Coronet Peak, Mt Hutt and The Remarkables ski fields in the South Island, saw far more New Zealanders this year than in previous years, said chief executive Paul Anderson. The company plans to expand The Remarkables ski field into an adjacent basin known as The Doolans, which would double the skiable area. We know that even for our local community, we're going to start to run out of capacity for skiing up there over the next seven to 10 years, he said. NZSki had been adapting to climate change, investing in snowmaking infrastructure for about 20 years, particularly at Coronet Peak which was the lowest mountain and more susceptible to climate change, he said. Its actually got the biggest snowmaking installation in the Southern Hemisphere for that very reason, he said. Anderson said the company did not need to invest in alternative revenue streams yet. We will be in the southern mountains for decades to come, he said, noting the company had just built three new chairlifts in the last four years which were expected to last 30 years. That probably gives some indication of our confidence for the future. Still, he said the weather could be variable and while the company was coming out of a massive record year, it had also had some very poor years. I would expect the seasons to get shorter over time, he said. The million-dollar question is how quickly that evolution happens. - With AP