Ski tourism is a multi-billion dollar international market attracting between 300 and 350 million annual skier visits. With its strong reliance on specific climatic conditions, the ski industry is regarded as the tourism market most directly and immediately affected by climate change. A critical review of the 119 publications that have examined the climate change risk of ski tourism in 27 countries is provided. This growing and increasingly diverse literature has projected decreased reliability of slopes dependent on natural snow, increased snowmaking requirements, shortened and more variable ski seasons, a contraction in the number of operating ski areas, altered competitiveness among and within regional ski markets, and attendant implications for ski tourism employment and values of vacation property real estate values. The extent and timing of these consequences depend on the rate of climate change and the types of adaptive responses by skiers as well as ski tourism destinations and their competitors. The need to understanding differential climate risk grows as investors and financial regulators increasingly require climate risk disclosure at the destination and company scale. Key knowledge gaps to better assist ski tourism destinations to adapt to future climate risk are identified.

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One of the key features of the post-Rio era has been how global environmental governance is mediated between local, national and global levels of government. In this article, we draw on experiences from local climate policy planning in Norway in order to discuss the ways in which climate change enters into a municipal policy setting. Based on the Norwegian case, supplemented with knowledge gained from an international literature review, we present a typology of six different categories of local climate policy. We highlight that local actors can both play the role as a structure for the implementation of national or international climate objectives, as well as that of being policy actors taking independent policy initiatives. We emphasize how the relationship between national and local authorities is a crucial factor if climate policy as a specific local responsibility should be further strengthened. (c) 2007 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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