Winter games’ postponement is a clarion call, say environment scientists

Srinagar, Feb 18: The avenues for winter tourism and winter sports in Kashmir will only dwindle with time, climate scientists have projected. The postponement of Winter Games on Monday, they say, is a clarion call for immediate measures to slow down snow-melt at the mountainous tourist spots like Gulmarg.

The second phase of the “Fifth Khelo India Winter Games”, scheduled between February 22 and 25, was postponed, with authorities citing inadequate snow as the reason. Experts link it to long-term warming trends over Himalayas, and more pronounced at popular tourist destinations like Gulmarg. This year has also recorded scant precipitation and warmer winter months, making snow cover vanish faster. These changes do not come as a surprise for environmental scientists.

In 2014, a landmark study was carried out by Prof. Shakeel Romshoo and his team, acclaimed scientist and present Vice-Chancellor of Islamic University of Science and Technology.

The research team included Riyaz Ahmed Dar, Irfan Rashid, and Arif Marazi and concluded, “Climate change poses a huge problem for the sustenance of winter tourism. Winter tourism depends on good snow conditions and is highly sensitive to snow-deficient winters.”

As if prophesied for the current crisis, climate change will lead to a new pattern of favored and disadvantaged ski tourism in the region, reads the research paper. The analysis of hydrometeorological data collected over many years by this team revealed “a significant statistical increasing trend in average minimum and maximum temperature, especially during winter months.”

The research paper titled “Sustainability of Winter Tourism in Kashmir” states that the rise in temperature affected snow cover in two ways: the amount of precipitation received in the form of snow was lower, and the snow cover did not last long enough. The “actual time period for snowfall has undergone a change with December and January receiving scanty or no snowfall while February and March witnessing relatively heavy snowfall,” it reads.

Prof. Romshoo, while speaking to Greater Kashmir, said that the paper was published over a decade ago, and the effects of climate change were getting more and more prominent every year.

“Winter tourism may not be sustainable. We have been studying Gulmarg and Pahalgam for a long time and have also started taking data from Sonmarg now,” he said. He expressed concern over unregulated tourism activities and numbers over eco-fragile zones. “We need to pay attention to what we are doing to the environment and how it will impact us in a few years to come,” he said. He said while it was understood that tourism and a good number of tourists into Pahalgam and Gulmarg were helping in strengthening the local economy, the unregulated tourism into such fragile ecosystems poses a threat to the natural resources—the snow cover and glaciers.

Snow-related sports activities have been affected by scanty snow cover in the Alps as well, with many countries now relying on artificial snow. However, many critics call this energy-intensive process of ‘creating snow’ a climate adaptation trap, where more harm is done to ecology by the consumption of more energy for these activities.