ENVIRONMENTAL researchers say the end of Australia's ski culture is in sight, despite Victoria and NSW experiencing one of their best snow seasons in almost a decade.
People were still shredding up powder last weekend at some of Australia's top ski resorts, but Griffith associate professor Catherine Pickering says snow is rapidly disappearing because of global warming and by 2020 Australia may not have any left.
"We've predicted by 2020 to lose something like 60 per cent of the snow cover of the Australian Alps," Professor Pickering, from the Griffith School of Environment, said.
"Unfortunately because our current emissions and our current rises in temperatures are at the high end of the predictions, it's definitely coming to us sooner and faster."
Professor Pickering researched the effects of declining snow cover and hotter summers on the Australian Alps and says this year's better than average season has been a one-off combination of La Nina and a cold snap.
"We'll still occasionally have good years, but they'll become less frequent," she said. "A poor year in the past will be a good year now."
The research covered all Victoria and NSW ski resorts and Professor Pickering says the alpine region is most threatened by climate change, with an increasing threat to endemic and endangered mountain species as well as plants because of early thaws.
Ski resorts will have to rely heavily on snow machines, she said, which was not sustainable.
"Ski resorts will have to increase snow making . . . which is limiting in cost and water," she said. "Because we don't have very high mountains . . . we don't have large water catchments above our resorts. In a few years, the amount of water that ski resorts will need to make snow is going to exceed the amount of water that's used by Canberra."
Professor Pickering said because of rising costs and diminishing snow coverage, Australian skiers would go overseas to Europe or the US.
Italian ski instructor Rene Crazzolara, who spends seven months a year at Thredbo, NSW, says Australia's poor seasons are not to do with global warming, but our low altitude when compared with European terrain: "Europe has generally better skiing because it has higher mountains. It's not global warming, it's altitude."
