When nature calls

The World Wide Fund for Nature has slammed Eastern European ski resorts for the potential impact they are having on the environment in some of the continent's last great wildlife pockets...

There looks to be a slippery slope ahead for ski resorts in Eastern Europe - ambitious plans to construct dozens of new resorts in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and the Ukraine could have grave financial, environmental and social repercussions, a recent study by World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) claims.

The Fund's Report says, "A number of factors, including rising energy costs, climate Change and external costs including water abstraction and biodiversity loss suggest that many of these areas warrant critical appraisal of long term costs and benefits, both in terms of profitability and public interest."

"We risk having ‘white elephants' dotting our increasingly green mountains - expensive investments whose cost, both financial as well as social and environmental, exceed their supposed usefulness," added the report.

Andreas Beckman, Deputy Director of WWF's Danube-Carpathian programme, said, "Construction of ski facilities removes large areas of forest to make way for ski pistes, access roads and infrastructure, reducing and fragmenting habitat for wildlife."

As the majority of the developments are being located at less than 1,500 metres above sea level - a threshold considered in the Alps to be the lowest point at which a ski resort can be currently considered viable in terms of snowfall for skiing - ski resorts with ‘only short term prospects of natural snow also raise significant cost and environmental concerns if they try to keep themselves going with artificial snow,' the report found.

The 3,100 snow cannons around Europe which top up the snow cover, consume some 260,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) worth of electricity annually - this could power a city of 150,000 people for a year.

Wrong side of the law

As well as threatening the natural environment and wildlife, many resorts are being constructed illegally.

A number of Bulgarian projects are being built in protected areas including Rila and Pirin National Parks and Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev opened an illegally constructed ski lift in September.

In Romania, 102 developments have been planned, including in eight of the country's national parks, such as Retezat and Piatra Craiului, the country's main protected areas.

Many are to be built in the Carpathian Mountains, which are currently home to over half of Europe's largest remaining populations of brown bears, wolves and lynxes.

In the Ukraine a £2.5 billion development at Bukovel in the Carpathian Mountains is predicted to be one of the largest in the world with 100,000 beds and 66 lifts, all of which threaten one of Europe's last great wilderness areas.

The report calls on Governments and developers take a critical look at development plans and properly assess the financial, social and environmental costs.

It says, "Skiers have a basic moral responsibility not to support at least those ski areas with the greatest environmental impact, especially those that have been constructed illegally."

All about the money

It has also been revealed that the plans to construct new resorts are far from stable financially.

Up to two-thirds of Alpine ski areas could go out of business due to a lack of snow on current climate Change projections, which see temperature rises of between 2 and 5.2 degrees Celsius in coming decades, research from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has suggested.

Thus, the wilderness areas could be damaged for no reason.

Andreas Beckman concluded, "It is irresponsible for Governments to not only allow but actively support such damage when there is very likely no economic future for these resorts.

"If the real reason is a very short term bonanza of chalet speculation then it will be an economic, environmental and social tragedy," he added.

Picture by Garrulus