CLIVUS - Climate Change Vulnerability of Summer Ski Centres in Norway

The tempo-spatial shrinkage of snow cover along the past decades has shortened the ski tourism season at many locations, while most mountain glaciers, which are the true natural resources for summer skiing tourism in Norway and worldwide, have also got sm aller. The research on climate change and summer skiing industry, as well as the use of glaciers for summer skiing, is a relatively new phenomenon, despite the numerous studies on winter tourism and climate change. In this project, we mainly discuss the c limate change adaptation of summer skiing, treating the vulnerability concept as the umbrella which does not necessarily encapsulate but always intersects its elements of exposure and sensitivity and adaptive capacity and ultimately yields the needed adap tation measures. Then we look at how those winter tourism adaptation measures have been adopted, adjusted and prioritized by the summer skiing tourism industry, by both of its supply and demand sides, and in terms of the environmental, especially emission -related, consequences of the measures themselves. In order to achieve these objectives, we shall pursue a transdisciplinary and an inductive methodology that is specific to each case in Norway but also challenges to build knowledge for the whole. These t wo aspects will help liaise the local and outer actors of the sector and the scholars of the most diverse natural and social disciplines and form a bottom-up direction from on-site findings to hands on implementations and towards reaching a broader unders tanding.