Can Winter Tourism Destinations Responsibly Adapt to Climate Change?

SUMMARY

• Alpine regions that rely on winter tourism are already facing shorter, less predictable seasons due to global warming.
• A common policy response is to ‘rebalance’ tourism toward summer (hiking, cycling, wellness) to compensate for winter losses - but only a few destinations have built summer seasons that come close to winter revenues.
• The case of Seiser Alm (Italy) shows that successful summer expansion can trigger negative repercussions that constrain tourism-led climate adaptation.
• Summer replacing winter can slide into maladaptation if it deepens tourism dependence and erodes local acceptance.

Climate change is reshaping the basic conditions under which winter tourism destinations operate. Many mountain economies have historically depended on reliable snowfall, but global warming increasingly compromises natural snow cover and the viability of low-elevation resorts. In a scenario of global warming become three degrees, the IPCC’s assessment of mountain areas highlights the risks that declining snow and warmer temperatures pose for snow-dependent activities and the operation of all ski resorts.

The best-known short- to medium-term response has been technical snowmaking. But as winters become increasingly warmer, snowmaking becomes costlier, more constrained by temperature windows, and less able to guarantee the conditions for skiing and winter tourism. In this context, “season extension” and year-round tourism are widely promoted as a longer-term adjustment pathway – shifting investment and marketing toward summer products like hiking, cycling, gastronomy, and wellness. These ideas are now embedded across Alpine policy discussions about how to manage tourism transitions under climate change as the recent report by the Alpine Convention exemplifise.

However, many tourism-intensive regions across the Alps and beyond experience overcrowding, locals complaining about mass tourism, and associated ecological concerns. This raises the question of whether seasonal expansion – even if expanding summer tourism works economically – has social limits that make it politically unsustainable?

Season expansion as adaptation?

From a planning perspective, summer tourism seems to offer two attractions. First, it appears to reduce reliance on snow: if winter seasons shorten, a stronger summer can stabilise jobs, fill beds, and maintain local business ecosystems. Second, it is often framed as ‘diversification’ rather than structural change - allowing regions to keep tourism as key growth driver while extending the tourism calendar.

Yet, a region that relies even more heavily on tourism as its primary growth engine may become vulnerable to new shocks and new distributional conflicts - especially when visitor volumes rise beyond what residents consider acceptable and the pressures of tourism expand from a few peak winter weeks into a near-permanent feature of everyday life.

The case of Seiser Alm

Seiser Alm, in the Dolomites, is a useful ‘testing ground’ for season extension. It already has one of Italy’s most scalable summer tourism ecosystems alongside its winter offer. That makes it a quasi-natural laboratory for the big policy hope: does seasonal expansion present a viable adaptation strategy as winters become more unstable?

Drawing on 41 interviews with regional tourism and political stakeholders, alongside policy documents and media reporting, the article traces how this strategy plays out on the ground.

The picture is paradoxical. On the one hand, Seiser Alm demonstrates that summer can become a major pillar: the region has experienced strong post-pandemic growth and, in recent years, with peak summer months attracting a higher number of overnight stays than during winter months. On the other hand, the interviews and tourism reports highlight a crucial complication: winter visitors spend more per day. Therefore, substituting winter revenue requires larger summer volumes in terms of visitor numbers. As a result, substituting winter losses through seasonal expansion means more guests, more infrastructure, more intensity – precisely where residents are starting to experience crowding as a quality-of-life issue.

When climate adaptation becomes politically contested

Seiser Alm has become a visible site of overtourism controversies. Media narratives and viral videos focus on queues at lifts and congestion, while local protests and organisational mobilisation communicate a sense that visitor numbers have exceeded a tolerable threshold.

Importantly, this is not only a discourse: it has developed into formal political demands. Residents and opposition actors have advanced proposals ranging from stronger ‘hot spot management’ to limiting access, stop infrastructure expansion, halting tourism advertising, and prioritising locals in access to services and infrastructure. The underlying claim is not simply that tourism is “bad”, but that the living environment is being reorganised around visitors across multiple seasons.

Stakeholders within the tourism economy interpret these tensions differently. Some frame overtourism as an exaggeration driven by a handful of peak days, and they argue that critics ignore periods of low occuppacity. But the conflict itself reveals the central political resource at stake: legitimacy. Local acceptance – captured in the German term Tourismusgesinnung (a supportive “tourism mindset”) – appears increasingly fragile when summer intensification is added to already tourism-heavy winters.

A key implication follows: social factors are not only “barriers” that exist before an adaptation strategy is implemented. They can become constraints that emerge because adaptation succeeds in expanding seasons generating touristic income; only once summer tourism grows enough to matter economically do the distributional conflicts, everyday pressures, and political mobilisation become salient.

Lessons for climate-vulnerable Alpine economies

The Seiser Alm case points to four broader lessons for climate-vulnerable Alpine economies.

First, replacing winter income is not just an economic challenge; it may also be socially problematic as equivalent revenue requires much higher visitor volumes outside winter. Therefore, destinations may hit acceptability thresholds and trigger backlash - undermining the political foundation on which tourism-led adaptation depends.

Second, the case suggests that adaptation and maladaptation are best understood as a continuum. “Seasonal extension” can look like sensible diversification, but it can also deepen dependence on a single sector and its ability to adapt – particularly where growth strategies become contested and polarised.

Third, extending the season does not automatically ‘spread’ demand. Visitor pressure can remain concentrated in peak weeks and hotspots, meaning that adding a summer season can intensify crowding effects.

Finally, if year-round tourism remains the dominant strategy, destinations may need to rethink governance: from managing tourism demand to managing the living environment that tourism transforms – mobility, access, and the everyday experience of place.

Digested Read produced by the author with editorial assistance from Anya Pearson.