Alpine resorts are increasingly seeking to cope with the impacts of climate change, from melting glaciers to shifting tourist demands. Sustainable solutions are available but how are Switzerland and other Alpine countries coping.
Alpine resorts are struggling to cope with the growing realities of climate change: melting glaciers, shifting tourist expectations, and the challenge of reinventing mountain life itself. For those of us who have watched these peaks for a lifetime, the transformation is as personal as it is planetary. In Part I of this two-part series, journalist and author Edward Girardet returns to an article originally written in 2017. You can read Part II in this series Adapting to a Melting World HERE.
As a child visiting Switzerland in the 1960s, I spent my summers high above the Rhone Valley in Riederalp, a 2,000-metre high resort perched within sight of some of the country’s best known mountains: the Matterhorn, Jungfrau and Dom. Together with my family, we often came to visit my grandfather, a Paris-based theosophist, who, every year, made a point of spending three months in the Alps to enjoy the clean air, walking and seclusion.
The hotel we stayed at was the Villa Cassel, an eccentrically bizarre Victorian mansion built in 1902 by the German-born British banker Sir Ernest Cassel, an Ashkanazy Jew, as a retreat for health and contemplation. He even had a flat trail built around the Riederhorn so that his ill sister could do the walk comfortably in about two hours. Totally out of place in this pristine mountain terrain, Villa Cassel stood less than a 30-minute hike down to the base of the immense Great Aletsch Glacier, Europe’s largest ice flow.
The Villa Cassel, now a Pro Natura centre, at the base of the Riederhorn.
Photo: Edward Girardet
Back then, you could reach Riederalp by cable car but then climb the final kilometre on foot with one's luggage brought up by mule. Today you can still walk this final stretch, but also e- or mountain bike up, or “cheat” by taking a chairlift to the nearby Hohfluh. Now a popular winter resort, Riederalp boasts a latticework of lifts fans out across its slopes during the skiing season.
The Villa’s eccentric history remains part of Alpine lore. Cassel hosted figures such as Winston Churchill, who reputedly complained of cowbells interrupting his writing. Later, turned into a small hotel in 1924, Villa Cassel became a meeting ground for curious or reclusive minds: scientists, writers, financiers, even a German-Jewish botanist couple, both survivors of Auschwitz as attested by the tattooed numbers on their arms, who returned each summer to speak their native tongue without having to set foot again in Germany.
The Villa Cassel located just below the Riederhorn.
Photo: Edward Girardet
For me, a budding Gerald-Durrell-style naturalist, the mountains were a living laboratory. Out the door every day immediately after breakfast, I wandered the mountains, mayens, and woods searching for chamois, foxes, marmots and eagles. or collecting lizards, newts, frogs and snakes, which I kept in my room at the hotel, only to release them on departure. I also pressed Alpine plant and flower specimens to take back home.
Occasionally, too, I accompanied the park ranger on his rounds through the Aletsch forest down to the glacier itself, sometimes circumnavigating its deep crevices to reach the other side.
Leaving the Villa Cassel in the mid-1960s for the cable car station with our baggage loaded onto a mule.
Photo: Edward Girardet
The soundscape has changed as much as the view. The sharp crack of a cowherd’s leather and wooden whip with a small tail of feathered string at the tip to make the gunshot sound once echoed across the valley as he watched his herd through summer. Both at dawn and at night, he milked the cows but also made cheese in a mountain hut. Now the milk is collected daily by electric vehicle on a smooth path up from the village. The whip, and much of the romanticism, has vanished.
When I was a boy, the hotel porter hauled provisions by mule and sometimes let me accompany him down to the glacier to carve ice, thousands of years old, for homemade ice cream. The Aletsch then stretched 23 kilometres then and buttressed 27 billion tons of ice. A bit further down, the Swiss were constructing a dam to harness the glacier's meltwater, eventually as part of a nation-wide network of 240 large and 1000 small dams that would come to provide over half the country’s electricity.
Dams in the Valais provide hydropower to Switzerland and neighbouring countries.
Photo: Fleuve Rhone
Today, when you look down from the same vantage from the hotel, you can no longer see the glacier, but rather a thriving forest, part of the Aletsch Nature Reserve. As the ice river retreats, new ecosystems emerge in slow motion, claiming the space where ice once ruled.
The retreating glaciers of the Alps. By the end of the century, most will be gone.
Photo: Swiss Tourism
Since 1880, the Aletsch has shrunk nearly three kilometres. When I first wrote about it in 2017, scientists measured its retreat at roughly one kilometre in less than four decades. Pro Natura, a Swiss conservation organization, now estimates a loss of up to 50 metres a year. Today, the glacier is barely 20 kilometres long, its fractured surface spread thinly over 78 square kilometres.
"The glacier is receding noticeably," said Thomas Flory, head of Pro Natura's Environmental Education section. "We used to be able to do glacier excursions straight down from the Aletsch forest. Today, you have to climb further up and it takes much longer."
Changes in the permafrost are also having a drastic effect. "There have been landslides creating ravines across the walking paths obliging one to block access or to build new ones," added Flory. Local alpine guides are constantly having to plot new routes just to reach the ice.
The glaciers are not only disappearing; they are revealing. As the Alpine ice gives up its secrets, it returns fragments of history long entombed, from Neolithic tools to the remains of lost mountaineers.
In 2012, a British couple hiking the Aletsch stumbled upon the bodies of three brothers missing for 86 years. In 2023, walkers on the Chessjen Glacier near Saas-Fee on the opposite side of the Rhone Valley discovered a British climber lost since 1972. Two Japanese alpinists, vanished in 1970, re-emerged in 2014 at the foot of the Matterhorn Glacier. Police in Valais still list more than 300 people missing in the region since 1925.
The bodies of two Japanese climbers who disappeared in 1970 were found with bottles and backpacks in the Tsanfleuron Glacier.
Photo:Glacier 3000
It is as though the mountains themselves are slowly exuding the memories of those who once challenged them.
Why such turmoil among Europe’s most storied mountains? Because the Alps are warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, roughly 2°C since the late 19th century. The consequences are visible everywhere: earlier snowmelt, vanishing permafrost, plants blooming weeks ahead of schedule, and violent weather rolling through valleys that once knew predictable seasons.
On 28 May 2025, part of the Birch glacier in the Bietschhorn region collapsed after heavy rains and permafrost melt, unleashing a landslide that destroyed much of the village of Blatten less than 20 kilometres from Riederalp. Fortunately, early evacuations spared nearly everyone; only one shepherd outside the zone lost his life. (See Peter Hulm Global Geneva story on the lessons of Blatten for catastrophe planning)
The mountain collapse over the Swiss mountain village of Blatten.
Photo: Swiss Federal Office of Topography.
The Lichtenstein-based International Commission for the Protection of the Alps (CIPRA) warns that Alpine temperatures could climb another 2°C within 50 years. The implications for water, energy, infrastructure, and life itself are staggering.
For millennia, the Alps have served as Europe’s “water tower,” feeding the Rhone, Rhine, Danube, and Po rivers that sustain tens of millions of people from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. By 2090, most Alpine ice sheets may be gone, no longer producing the snow melt we have taken for granted, thus calling into question Switzerland’s ability to continue servicing its crucial hydroelectric network.
Already, scientists and local communities are racing to adapt by monitoring permafrost, reinforcing infrastructure from dams to tunnels, and tracking the expected birth of hundreds of new glacial lakes forming in the wake of retreating ice.
The paradox is both stark and poetic. As the Alps shed their frozen cover, they are sprouting new forests, lakes, and meadows, an evolving landscape that mirrors our own struggle to adapt to a warming world.
Despite the warming of glaciers, there has been a steady rewilding of the Alps from eagles to wolves.
Photo: Vogelwarte.ch
By the late 1960s, the Villa Cassel itself - as a building - was in danger of collapse and stopped functioning as a hotel. Threatened by demolition, Pro Natura transformed it into a conservation centre in 1976. Since then, the Swiss-based nature organization has completely renovated the building providing a café-restaurant as well as museum, workshop and boarding facilities with a nearby Alpine Garden, all serving as an ideal location for studying the region’s natural history.
Villa Cassel's Alpine garden is part of Pro Natura's information outreach to the public.
Photo: Edward Girardet
On my last trip back to Villa Cassel earlier this year, I imagined my grandfather beside me as we surveyed the same peaks, now shrouded in haze, that I had first witnessed as a 10-year-old. What once felt eternal now seems fragile, leaving one to wonder whether we as human beings can do anything to halt the erosion process, or at least, how we can live with it.
The Alps are changing. Drastically. Yet these mountains also remind us of something essential: our place within nature’s cycles, not above them. The rushing water of a bis, a traditional irrigation sluice similar to what one finds in high mountain communities from Kurdistan to Afghanistan; the bleating of black-faced Valais mountain sheep roaming the boulders and Alpine pastures overlooking the Aletsch; or the warning shish of a chamois grazing along the treeline of the Riederhorn.
Or the signs of the present and future: the whirring of an electric milk cart, the laughter of a group of youths shooting past on their mountain bikes, or a helicopter transporting building materials from the bottom of the Rhone Valley to strengthen a high mountain bridge. Each marks another chapter in a story still unfolding.
As I look down on what used to be a vast glacier, there are now only freshly exposed rocks and moraine with new tree growth pushing its way up the mountain. What is vanishing is not only ice, but certainty.
To be continued: Part II – Adapting to a Melting World: Reinventing Life and Tourism in the Alps
Global Geneva editor Edward Girardet is a journalist and author who has covered conflict, humanitarian and environmental issues worldwide for over 40 years.
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