As Switzerland’s glaciers shrink, a way of life may melt away

Switzerland’s glaciers shrink:

For centuries, Swiss farmers have sent their cattle, goats and sheep up into the mountains to graze in the warmer months, before bringing them back down in early autumn. The tradition of ‘summering’, invented in the Middle Ages to preserve precious grass in the valleys for winter supplies, has so transformed the countryside into a patchwork of forests and meadows that the preservation of its appearance was written into the Swiss Constitution as an essential role of agriculture. .

It has also knitted together essential threads of the country’s modern identity: Alpine cheeses, hiking trails crisscrossing summer meadows, cowbells echoing off the mountainsides.

In December, the United Nations heritage organization announced UNESCO added the Swiss tradition on the exalted list of ‘intangible cultural heritage‘.

But climate change threatens to disrupt those traditions. Warming temperatures, loss of glaciers, less snow and earlier snowmelt are forcing farmers across Switzerland to adapt.As Switzerland’s glaciers shrink

Not everyone experiences the changes in the same way in a country where the Alps create many microclimates. Some enjoy greater yields on summer pastures, allowing them to extend their alpine season. Others are forced to descend earlier with their herds due to more frequent and intense droughts.

The clearer the effect on the Swiss, the more potential problems it poses for the whole of Europe.

Switzerland has long been considered the water tower of Europe, the place where deep winter snow accumulates and gently melts during the warmer months, increasing the seeping runoff from thick glaciers that has sustained many of Europe’s rivers and its way of life for centuries held.

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

He has also watched the glacier – which stretches about nine kilometers above the Alps near Realp – turn black as protective winter snow melts, exposing previous years of pollution in a pernicious feedback loop.

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

To get to the glacier from the road, his students walk over mounds of white tarpaulin stretched around an ice cave carved out for tourists. The sails can reduce annual melting by as much as 60 percentbut they cover only a tiny fraction of the glaciers, and in places such as ski slopes, where there is a private financial motivation.

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

The government is trying to tackle the changes and preserve Switzerland’s Alpine traditions, including major infrastructure projects to bring water to the top of the mountains so that animals can graze in the summer months.

For now, the traditions, even if strained in some places, continue. After three days of clambering over rocky mountain slopes and zigzagging stone steps, the first sheep of a gigantic flock of almost 700 sheep came into view at the end of their ‘summer period’ last autumn.

As a crowd of onlookers cheered, some sheep reared up. Others stood stock still and had to be coaxed along by shepherds in matching plaid shirts and leather cowboy hats, decorated with wildflowers and feathers.

The sheep had been living in the wild for more than three months, roaming a high, vast wilderness, hemmed in by glaciers. Their only contact with humanity has been the visits of a single shepherd, Fabrice Gex, who says he loses more than 30 pounds a season as he walks through the area checking on them.

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

To return them to their owners, who are mostly hobby farmers, he was accompanied by a team of shepherds – known locally as ‘sanner’ from Middle High German samnen, ‘to gather’ – who arrive by helicopter.

The work is hard and modestly paid, but locally it is considered an honor to take part in a tradition first recorded in 1830 but many believe began centuries earlier.

“Being a sanner gives you roots,” said Charly Jossen, 45, as he enjoyed a beer with many spectators after completing his 11th season in the fall. “You know where you belong.” He brought his son Michael, 10, with him for the first time.

Historically, the sanner took the sheep across the tongue of the Oberaletsch Glacier. But the retreat of the glacier has made that route too unstable and dangerous for a long time. In 1972, the community of Naters blew a path into a steep rock face to provide the shepherds and sheep with an alternative way home.

This season, the Shepherds plan to delay their return by two weeks, said their leader, André Summermatter, 36.

“Climate change is making our vegetation period longer,” he said, standing in the old stone pen where sheep are gathered at the end of their migration. “This way the sheep can stay longer.”

The tradition of alpine grazing, or ‘transhumance’, spreads throughout the Alps, including Austria, Italy and Germany.

Nearly half of Swiss livestock farms send their goats, sheep and cows to summer pastures, according to the latest in-depth study by government scientists from 2014.

More than 80 percent of farmers’ income in the Alps comes from government subsidies – much of which is intended to keep pastures free of encroaching trees. uphill with warmer temperatures.

That makes Switzerland a rare country that has not embraced tree cover as a solution to climate change.

“If we weren’t there, it would be all bushes and forests,” said Andrea Herger, as she herded cows past a hikers’ inn to her family’s milking parlor, halfway up a mountain near Isenthal. “It wouldn’t be such open, beautiful landscapes to walk.”

Her husband, Josef Herger, is the third generation in his family to run the company alpine summer farm, which is accessible via its own cable car. They bring seven cows from their own farm and 33 cows from the neighbors, which they pay for with cow’s milk that the couple uses to make cheese.

Further west, near L’Etivaz, the Mottier family pushes 45 cows along what they call a “mountain train,” following the newly sprouting grass to a summit of 2,030 meters, or more than 6,600 feet, and then back down again to nibble on the second growth of grasses. From May they will make five trips, stopping at three levels.

Near the summit, Benoît Mottier, 24, climbed a limestone rock decorated with the initials of lazy shepherds and the years they carved it. The oldest one he can find was left in the 18th century by someone with his initials: BM

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

The Mottiers are one of 70 families in the area that make a traditional Swiss cheese called L’Etivaz. They follow strict rules: slowly heating fresh milk in a gigantic copper cauldron over a spruce fire. After the cheese is pressed, they take it to a local cooperative, where it is aged and sold.

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

“We like to get started at the beginning of the season,” says Isabelle Mottier, Benoît’s mother. “At the end of the season we are happy that it is over.”

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

The Mottier summer farm draws water from a spring. The drought of recent years has forced the family to adapt.

“A cow drinks 80 to 100 liters of water per day,” explains Mrs. Mottier. “We have more than forty cows. We need an enormous amount of water.”

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

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

So they installed a solar-powered pump to draw water from a lower source, and purchased a large water bag to store melted snow early in the season.

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

In anticipation of this, the Swiss government has quadrupled funding for water projects in the Alps. It approved 40 in 2022.

Near the village of Jaun, a construction crew laid pipes to deliver electricity and water from a new reservoir to six local farms. In 2022, some families brought their herd of cows down the mountain a month early due to the drought and heat.

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

However, that variability can occur even on one mountain, he said. Farmers with mobile milking stations can take advantage of this ‘small-scale heterogeneity’ by taking their cows – and their milking machines – to less arid areas.

“As the climate changes, you need flexibility,” Mr. Schneider said.

In the Italian Alps, near St. Ulrich, Thomas Comploi’s family has won the climate change lottery.

Like many farmers in the Alps, he uses part of his land solely to produce hay; it is too steep for cattle to graze. Today, twice as much grass grows on his fields as fifteen years ago.

The provincial government of Bolzano-South Tyrol gives him subsidies for avalanche prevention and land management, he said.

“All this would have disappeared without farmers. – it would be covered in forest,” said Mr Comploi, 48, who works for the local cable car company in winter.

He added: “We keep the tradition alive – the passion and the way of life.”

In Swiss Alpine communities, the final descent at the end of summer is a celebration of the age-old way of life. Families replace the small bells on their cows with giant traditional bells to announce the event.

“If you put on the big bells, they know they are going down,” says Eliane Maurer, as she chases a young cow that wanders off the narrow path and backs down the mountainside from the Engstligenalp.

Her family is one of dozens bringing about 450 animals to the pasture this season. They spread their descent in shifts, so as not to cause bottlenecks.

Mrs. Maurer and her family were the second to leave before dawn.

They walked under a full moon. The sound of cowbells echoing through the surrounding mountains was thunderous.

Paula Haase reported from Hamburg, Germany; Elise Boehm from Bologna, Italy; and Leah Süss from Zurich and Belalp.