Erstellt am: 4. 3. 2011 - 20:00 Uhr

Sustainability in the Snow?

A small Salzburg village is offering "carbon neutral" holidays. Is it a marketing gag or a visionary project?

If you can’t win the game, why not make up a new game and play by your own rules? As many of Austria's bigger ski resorts fight an expensive and ecologically destructive war of ever more bombastic consumption - offering new 8-man chairlifts with heated seats, flood-lit night skiing and multi-story car parks - little Werfenweng has chosen a different path.

The Salzburg village, with a permanent population of just 900, a limited ski area and a dodgy snow record, now finds itself talked about across the world - from the Hida Mountains of Japan to the Rocky Mountains of North America - as one of the first winter resorts to offer 'carbon neutral' holidays.

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That Werfenweng is a bit different is apparent as soon as you approach village on a windy road up from the local transport hub of Bischofshofen. A wall of solar panels lines a south facing slope that is already depressingly green after another unseasonably warm spell in February.

More solar panels are mounted on pillars and dotted around the centre of the community, including, picturesquely, in the frozen village pond . They provide the community with 50% of its energy needs and power the space-age looking streetlamps that line the main road.

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Under a wooden shelter, you’ll find a fleet of eco-cars, available for rent by tourists and named "Grashüpfer" because they are powered by biodiesel harvested from the grass of local Alpine meadows. In summer you can rent electronic bikes, which you can recharge at a solar-filling station at the centre of the village.

The motto of the Werfenweng sustainability project is "soft mobility" which basically means leaving your car at home. As a mountain addict with a conscience, I was eager to try it out. I was picked up by a free shuttle minibus from the train station at Bischofshofen and, on showing my train ticket, I was given a special credit card sized "Samo card" (from Sanfte Mobilität) that gave me access to free taxi rides, equipment and guides for carbon-free sports like snow-shoe trekking, cross country skiing or even, believe it or not, lama trekking and a horse-drawn sleigh ride. You can get the card even if you arrive by car, but you have to hand over the keys to your vehicle at the tourism office first.

Mobility is a good starting point to tackling the environmental deficits of Austria, a country that has failed to live up to even the modest carbon cuts laid out at Kyoto. An estimated 30% of our carbon emissions come from transport; and toxic exhaust emissions are particularly nefarious in the fragile Alpine environment. The mountains remain a major transit zone, the roads carrying freight to all corners of Europe but also hundreds of thousands of tourists into once quiet valleys. Often small particle air pollution often reaches alarming levels in the valleys, bringing occasional revolt in the Inn Valley, and any project aiming to address this impact is bound to attract interest. But the inverted commas in Werfenweng's 'carbon neutral' are by no means accidental. The name remains more a target that reality.

The idea in Werfenweng is that you reduce your carbon footprint by using the progressive transport system and the rest is off-set through carbon payments the project makes on your behalf. “But we don’t want to just off-set the whole holiday,” says Brandauer. “It’s vital that the tourist makes use of every possibility to lessen their environmental impact.” The village is certainly no eco-utopia - at least not yet - and the more idealistic guests, admits the mayor, sometimes leave disappointed. As a guest, it's hard to see the carbon saving in taking a free diesel-powered taxi to a restaurant rather than driving your own car. And and while the ski-bus runs on biogas, the ski lifts do not. Conventional cars still speed down the main road and from my hotel balcony I could see guests swimming in an outdoor heated pool.

So is Werfenweng just a marketing gag? I would be more inclined to think so were it not for the honesty and openness of the mayor Peter Brandauer, who was once, at 28 years of age, the youngest mayor in Austria, and who is very much the pioneer of this project. Werfenweng has undeniably come a long way, but he freely admits it still has a long got way to go. His project is new and unusual; and new and unusual tends to be a hard-sell in Alpine communities. "Look," he tells me, "we could have banned all motorized traffic and stopped using all fossil fuel based energy, but then I would no longer be mayor and the project would no longer exist."

Instead he chose what he calls "the path of a thousand small steps." He sold the project to an initially skeptical community with economic arguments rather than ideological ones, arguing that this was the way to raise the resorts profile. Dissent was widespread, but as the number of guests rose – there has been a 28 % increase since the first years of the soft-mobility project - the community was won over. Locals started to benefit from the free shuttle service themselves and appreciate the reduction in traffic. It remains a voluntary project but now, says Brandauer, 42 hotels offer soft mobility holidays, that’s approximately of 80% of the available guest beds. He'd like to see the village totally free of cars and outside heated swimming pools but, returning to his metaphor: "We have got 500 or 600 of those steps left, but we have to take them by including the community not alienating them."

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Werfenweng in summer

Brandauer is, of course, under no illusion that little Werfenweng's sustainability project is going to rescue the fragile Alpine environment on its own. Climate change is coming to the Alps, whatever happens here. All scientific models show a steadily climbing snow line and more frequent bouts or the mid-winter warm spells that made a farce of the recent World Championship ski races in Garmisch. But he sees the project, which has received European Union funding, as a "beacon of light" for other resorts. He laughs when I liken him to Don Quixote, and says it sometimes does feel like he's fighting against windmills. But his green vision seems less hopeless than the attempts of low-lying Alpine ski resorts to prologue their winter seasons by investing in ever more energy-guzzling snow canons. And it's canny to recognize the market advantages to be made from the uniqueness of a project what will surely be a necessary transition for all resorts sooner rather than later.

Werfenweng is small but the idea is being exported. Twenty-four Alpine villages, including Hinterstoder, Mallnitz and Neukirchen am Großvenediger are now part of a transnational co-operation in soft mobility called Alpine Pearls that was founded in 2006 with the aim of to promoting sustainable tourism in the Alps. Brandauer says this loose coalition makes is to negotiate with business and politicians about subsidies and offers that make green travel attractive to tourists.

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But perhaps the most revolutionary message of the mayor of tiny Werfenweng is that Alpine holidays in the future will have to be less dependent on skiing, snowboarding and lifts – not overnight, of course, but sometime soon.

And that development, he says, will make sense for us as well as the environment. He says our current culture of frantically crunching away kilometers on the piste is not what holidays should be about. He wants to see a more laid-back culture return to the Alps in winter – "enthastet" seems to be his favourite word. With me he had his work cut out. I’m a recovering ski addict who celebrates when my pass shows I’ve taken 10,000 meters of lift altitude in a day and I often come back from skiing trips needing another holiday just to recover from the exertion!. So could I, an adrenaline junkie, chill out in a ski resort without getting bored?

Brandauer put me in the hands of a series of carbon-free Waltrauds. One, Waltraud Herrmann, took me on a free snow-shoeing trip in the secluded, wooded countryside far away from the pistes and then Waltraud Steiger took me on a ride on a sled drawn by two flatulent horses that farted their way through the slushy countryside. She says it was key to get the local businesses support “soft mobility” at an emotional level. "How could we convince our guests of the scheme until we believed it in ourselves?”

chris cummins

A ski addict tries out soft tourism!

At first the guests were suspicious of the scheme. Few wanted to hand over their keys, fearing that they'd feel trapped. But as the taxi service proved efficient, holiday-makers to Werfenweng seem to have been converted. More and more people are turning up at the tourism office asking for a Samo Card. When the project began, the percentage of people arriving by train was 8 percent. Today it’s 25 %. Steiger says the guests are more reluctant in summer when, despite organized bus tours to Salzburg and the castle at Hohenwerfen, guests want the freedom to explore the wider region.

Yet a culture of ecology seems be be sprouting around the slopes of Werfenweng. My daredevil Fm4 colleague Michael Schmid referred me to paragliding company, called Fly For Nature that will propel you in a tandem from the local peak, Bischling, and reinvesting part of the profits to fund reforestation project in Uganda. They also made this rather beautiful video:

And by championing a more diversified, softer version of the winter holiday, places like Werfenweng are getting getting welcome publicity for facing an issue now that surely most resorts will have to face one day. Austria is hopelessly adrift of its own carbon targets and winter tourism is its major industry. “There has to be a change in attitudes,” says Brandauer. Do we really need heated seats on lifts? Can more energy-efficient snow machines be created? Do we really need to keep expanding the Alpine ski resorts? Is bigger always necessarily better? Brandauer thinks the current tourism model is simply unsustainable – he might not be about to save the Alps, but he is raising interesting questions, as well as, quite conveniently, the profile of his tiny mountain community.

A Reality Check Special on "Green Travel"