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.

The broad objective of this study is to estimate the economic impact of changes in water availability due to climate change in Switzerland with a 2050 time horizon. To do so, the sectoral structure of the computable general equilibrium model GEMINI-E3 is being extended. Raw water resources are introduced as a production factor into the model and a drinking water distribution sector is specified for Switzerland to allow for a precise analysis of the economic consequences of restricted water supply. Predictions of water availability in 2050 are taken from a hydrological model and alternative climate change scenarios are considered. Simulations show possible restrictions in water resource availability to increase raw water prices substantially compared to the baseline. However, the global economic impact for Switzerland is rather small due to the low price of raw water in Switzerland and its small value in the benchmark scenario. Finally, the simulation of scenarios featuring alternative levels of endogenous adaptive capacity of the economy highlights the importance of the ability to reduce water losses and to transform production processes to decrease their water intensity in determining the extent of welfare losses provoked by a decrease in water availability.

This paper estimates the effect of energy tax (and price) changes on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and net trade at the industry level, using a panel of industries from European countries covering the period 1990-2003. We investigate the hypothesis that industries with high adaptive capacity (measured by their relative level of labour compensation) are able to mitigate the adverse effects of energy tax rises better than others. We identify the pro-adaptation effect by interacting wage levels (a proxy for human capital) with energy taxes. We find that the negative marginal effect of higher energy taxes on TFP and net trade is significantly reduced for industries with stronger human capital and even turns to an overall positive effect in at least two cases. Up to three lowwage sectors display an overall negative effect. This suggests that human capital is key to adaptation to higher energy costs and climate policy, in some cases making it a win-win.

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This 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 AlB 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 %.