Melting glaciers in Switzerland threatens way of life – 01/24/2024 – Environment

For centuries, Swiss farmers have sent their cattle, goats and sheep to graze up the mountain in the warmer months, before bringing them back in early autumn.

Created in the Middle Ages to save the valleys’ precious grass for winter, the “summering” tradition transformed the inland landscape into a mosaic of forests and pastures, to the point that maintaining its appearance was written into the Swiss Constitution as a essential role of agriculture.

The practice has also tied together essential threads of the country’s modern identity: alpine cheeses, hiking trails that crisscross summer pastures, cowbells echoing from mountain sides.

In December, UNESCO, the UN agency for education, science and culture, added the Swiss tradition to its vaunted list of “intangible cultural heritage.”

But climate change threatens to disrupt these traditions. Higher temperatures, the loss of glaciers, less snow and earlier snowmelt are forcing farmers across Switzerland to adapt.

Not everyone is feeling the changes the same way in a country where the Alps create many microclimates. Some are seeing higher yields on summer pastures, allowing them to extend their alpine seasons. Others are being forced by more frequent and intense droughts to come down earlier with their herds.

The more evident the effect on the Swiss, the more potential problems this poses for the whole of Europe.

Switzerland has long been considered Europe’s water tank, the place where deep winter snows accumulate and gently melt during the warmer months, increasing runoff from the thick glaciers that helped sustain many of the rivers and lakes. European ways of life for centuries.

Today, the Alps are warming about twice as fast as the global average, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the last two years alone, Swiss glaciers have lost 10% of their water volume — an amount equivalent to what melted from 1960 to 1990.

Since he began studying the Rhône Glacier in 2007, Daniel Farinotti, one of Europe’s leading glacier scientists, has seen it retreat by about half a kilometer and thin, forming a large glacial lake at its base.

He also saw the glacier — which stretches for about 9 kilometers near the town of Realp — turn black as the protective winter snow melts and reveals pollution from previous years in a vicious cycle.

“The darker the surface, the more sunlight it absorbs and the more melt is generated,” said Farinotti, who teaches at ETH Zurich and leads a summer course on the glacier.

To reach the glacier from the road, his students cross mounds of white tarps, stretched around an ice cave carved for tourists. Tarps can reduce annual melting by up to 60%, but they only cover a tiny portion of glaciers and in places like ski slopes, where there is a private financial incentive.

“You can’t cover an entire glacier with this,” said Farinotti, who also works for the Swiss Federal Institute for Forestry, Snow and Landscape Research.

The government is trying to cope with the changes and preserve Swiss alpine traditions, including with major infrastructure projects to bring water to mountaintops for animals that graze there in the summer months.

For now, the traditions, although eroded in some places, continue. After three days of climbing rocky slopes and zigzagging up stone steps, the first sheep of a giant flock of nearly 700 appeared on the horizon at the end of their “summer season” last fall (in the Northern Hemisphere, autumn begins in September).

While a crowd of spectators applauded, some sheep jumped around. Others stopped suddenly and had to be persuaded by shepherds in plaid shirts and leather hats, adorned with wildflowers and feathers.

The sheep had lived freely for more than three months — roaming a vast, high wilderness surrounded by glaciers. Their only contact with humanity had been the visits of a single shepherd, Fabrice Gex, who says he loses more than 13kg per season walking around the territory to check on them.

“I bring them salt, cookies and love,” said Gex, 49.

“With climate change, our vegetation period is longer,” said shepherd André Summermatter, 36, standing in the old stone corral where sheep are penned at the end of their journey. “Then the sheep can stay longer.”

The tradition of alpine herding, or “transhumance”, spreads throughout the Alpine region, including Austria, Italy and Germany.

Almost half of Switzerland’s livestock farms send their goats, sheep and cows to summer pastures, according to the last comprehensive study by government scientists in 2014.

More than 80% of alpine farms’ income comes from government subsidies — many of them to keep pastures free of invasive trees, which are moving higher as temperatures rise.

This makes Switzerland a rare country that does not embrace tree cover as a solution to climate change.

“It would be all bushes and forest if we weren’t here,” said Andrea Herger, herding grazing cows to her family’s milking barn, deep into a mountainside near Isenthal. “It wouldn’t be these open, beautiful landscapes for walking.”

Her husband, Josef Herger, is the third generation of his family to run their alpine summer farm, which is reached by a private cable car. They bring seven cows from their own farm and 33 cows from neighbors, who pay them in cow’s milk that the couple uses to make cheese.

Further west, near L’Etivaz, the Mottier family herds 45 cows along what they call the “mountain train”, following the newly sprouted grass to a 2,030-metre peak and then returning to graze in the second wave of grass growth. Starting in May, they make five trips, stopping at three levels.

Near the peak, Benoît Mottier, 24, climbed a limestone outcrop, decorated with the initials of idle shepherds and the years they carved them. The oldest one he found was left in the 1700s by someone with his initials —BM

He is the fifth generation of his family to take cows there.

The Mottiers are one of 70 families in the region who produce a traditional Swiss cheese called L’Etivaz. They follow strict rules — slowly heating fresh milk in a large copper cauldron over a spruce wood fire. After the cheese is pressed, they take it to a local co-op where it is aged and sold.

L’Etivaz can only be made on local mountain slopes for six months of the year. The tradition is so important that children from local farming families may leave school early for the summer holidays to help out.

“At the beginning of the season, we are happy to get started,” said Isabelle Mottier, Benoît’s mother. “At the end of the season, we’re glad it’s ending.”

“For us, it’s a life of cycles,” she said.

The Mottiers’ summer farm receives water from a spring. Droughts in recent years have forced the family to adapt.

“A cow drinks 80 to 100 liters of water a day,” explained Isabelle Mottier. “We have more than 40 cows. We need a huge amount of water.”

In 2015, during a heat wave, the spring dried up. Three years later, another heat wave and drought hit. And again in 2022.

During droughts, the Swiss army delivered water to alpine pastures using helicopters. However, the Mottiers had no tanks to store it.

So they installed a solar-powered pump to draw water from a lower spring and purchased a large water bag to store early-season snowmelt.

The situation is expected to worsen as the glaciers retreat. The country’s largest glaciers, including the Aletsch and Rhône, are expected to shrink by at least 68% by the end of the century.

In anticipation of this, the Swiss government quadrupled funding for alpine water projects. In 2022, 40 were approved.

Near the village of Jaun, a construction crew was laying pipes to supply electricity and water from a new reservoir to six local farms. In 2022, some families brought their cow herds down the mountain a month early due to drought and heat.

In other regions, warmer temperatures are making fields more productive, said Manuel Schneider, a scientist at Agroscope, the Swiss government’s national research institute, who is leading a five-year study of biodiversity and yields in alpine pastures.

This variability, however, can occur even within a single mountain, he said. Farmers with mobile milking stations can take advantage of this “small-scale heterogeneity” by moving their cows — and their milking machines — to less dry areas.

“When the climate is changing, you need flexibility,” Schneider said.