Is It Too Late To Save the Swiss Alps?

ZÜRICH — The Alpine village of Blatten, in Switzerland’s Lötschental valley, no longer exists. At least, not in the way its 303 residents once knew it. On a Wednesday afternoon in May, the mountain above it gave way. A slab of glacier, weakened by weeks of thaw and burdened by unstable rock, collapsed in seconds. Twenty million tons of ice and stone hurtled down 1,200 meters, moving faster than a car on the Autobahn. It was over in a few minutes.

A shepherd lost his life in the rock avalanche. Miraculously, he was the only casualty. Scientists monitoring the peak had warned of imminent collapse, and Blatten’s inhabitants were evacuated in time. Yet the physical village — homes, memories, the infrastructure that stitched together this remote alpine community — was obliterated. In the aftermath of the rock avalanche, the debris dammed the river running through the valley and formed a lake where the main street had been. When the debris settled, Blatten had become a landscape of ruin.

Within just a few hours, the mayor of the town, Matthias Bellwald, declared that the village was going to be rebuilt. Bellwald, a retired army officer who was elected mayor at the beginning of the year, drew applause from Blatteners, while many onlookers wondered about the cost and risk of rebuilding.

Zarick Berger, a filmmaker who lost his livelihood along with his home in Blatten, tells Truthdig that many people do want to rebuild. The mayor’s first priority, he explains, is clearing the cemetery. It is not simply a matter of debris removal — it is an act of dignity. “Many elderly people live in Blatten,” Berger says. “They do not want to be buried anywhere else.”

Fifteen years ago, Berger moved to Blatten from Canada. Property was cheap, the valley breathtaking. He built a life there; a small production company with contracts with Swiss television, and he painstakingly renovated his new home. All of it now lies entombed beneath tons of ice and rock.

A catastrophe foretold

When the evacuation was ordered a few days before the rock avalanche, Berger was in Spain. He returned just before the avalanche to a neighboring village in Lötschental valley, staying in a friend’s hotel. He did not anticipate staying there for months, he says, and remembers that he wasn’t very nervous.

When the mountain came down, he responded instinctively — filming, reporting, bearing witness. Only later did the truth settle in, “Then you realize that there is nothing left.” 

Mental health hotlines quickly became available, but few villagers used them. “It’s not their way,” Berger says. Instead, they drift, detachedly, through the streets of neighboring towns.

In the Lötschental, all available homes, holiday chalets and studios are now occupied by Blatteners. It is crucial that people in the valley stay there, maintaining the population of the schools and the number of workers at the cheese factory. As there was no place left in Lötschental, Berger himself moved out of the valley, but he still chose to live high up in the mountains. 

The Alps have always been perilous. For generations, Swiss mountaineers accepted danger as the price of living among peaks. Rockfalls, avalanches and mudslides were seasonal realities, endured with stoicism and cleared with shovels. 

But this time is different. The permafrost — soil or sediment that stays frozen, preventing water from seeping into deeper rock layers and stabilizing mountain slopes and rock glaciers — is thawing. Swiss glaciers are melting at record speeds, losing almost 40% of their volume over the past 25 years. In Blatten, the collapse wasn’t a freak accident; it was a harbinger. 

“The permafrost had thawed, causing the mountain peak to fall. The already weakened glacier then collapsed under the weight of the rock avalanche,” climate activist and author Marcel Hänggi tells Truthdig. The glacier was already weakened due to thawing as well, he says, “Those are effects of climate change.”

Such disasters could become more common. Scientists agree that in high mountain regions, rockfalls are on the rise. The culprit is clear enough — warmer summers mean faster snowmelt and deeper seasonal thaw in the once-frozen permafrost that holds these slopes together.

Beyond that, there is little certainty. Large-scale events like the one that buried Blatten remain difficult to predict, long term. Researchers at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) note that there is simply too little data. Regarding the Blatten and the Nesthorn collapse, they stop short of absolutes: permafrost, they say, is “a possible climate-sensitive influencing factor,” and climate change was “quite likely” relevant.

Others have been less restrained. Christian Huggel, a professor of geography in Zurich, dispensed with diplomatic hedging in a LinkedIn post written two days after the catastrophe. “It would be absurd, ignorant or dishonest,” he wrote, “to state that anthropogenic warming has not played any role in the ice-rock avalanche disaster in #Blatten.” 

The data bears him out. Switzerland’s summers have warmed by 3.3°C since pre-industrial times — twice the global average across all seasons. As snowfields vanish and glaciers shrink, bare rock absorbs more heat, accelerating the cycle. What the locals call “ancient wisdom” — generations of reading the mountains’ moods — no longer applies. The Alps are becoming something else entirely.

“Global warming will further increase the risk of rockfalls, mudslides and landslides in the Alps,” warns Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at the ETH and member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in an interview with Watson. “Unless we drastically reduce CO₂ emissions, it will be almost impossible to prevent such tragedies.”

And the Alps are not alone; from the Rockies to the Himalayas, mountain regions worldwide are confronting similar transformations. “Increased risks of natural hazards are responsible for resettlement of villages in certain high mountain areas,” states an IPCC report. 

The cost of clinging

Experts largely agree that it is next to impossible to rebuild the houses on the debris where Blatten once was. “The ice in the debris cone will melt continuously, giving way to minor landslides and disruptions in the future,” Hänggi predicts. Removing the debris would be an enormous task, and finding somewhere to store it is not straightforward either. 

The villagers are thus looking into the neighboring hamlets, where some houses remain. Already, a makeshift road has been cleared to be able to reach those houses, so why not rebuild there? Nobody can guarantee the slope above won’t repeatedly collapse. “The most important thing is that we do not expose the population to such a danger again,” says Seneviratne.

The question of whether it is worth maintaining expensive infrastructure has resurfaced. Should Switzerland retreat from certain alpine settlements? The idea is not new. Nearly two decades ago, architects from the ETH coined the term “alpine wastelands” to describe remote valleys in slow decline — places bypassed by urban networks and left out of the lucrative ski economy. Blatten fits the description; culturally rich yet economically peripheral, its population dwindling since World War II.

Maintaining such villages is enormously costly. Roads must be carved through shifting rock, and buses and postal routes snake into valleys with fewer and fewer passengers. Power lines, water systems and avalanche defenses require constant upkeep. For decades, this labor was framed as a testament to Swiss resilience — a people determined to tame their landscape.

But climate change has rewritten the risk calculus. The debate unfolding in Blatten mirrors a larger global quandary: How much are we willing to spend to keep people in harm’s way?

From flood-prone towns in Louisiana to coastal communities in New Zealand, climate change is forcing governments to consider “managed retreat” — moving entire populations out of danger zones. Yet relocation is emotionally and politically fraught. 

In the Swiss Alps, the issue is intensified by a deep sense of cultural loss; these valleys are not just places to live, but sites of collective memory, their traditions woven into the national psyche. The Lötschental Valley is known not only for its beautiful hiking routes, enchanted lakes and forest floors covered with wild blueberries; archeological findings hint that the valley was inhabited since the Bronze Age. The village of Blatten was first mentioned in writing in 1433, and it is home to a centuries-old carnival tradition. To relinquish mountain valleys would be to concede something fundamental about what it means to be Swiss — or Italian, Austrian or French.

At the same time, the Alps are also Europe’s water tower and energy bank. Their glaciers feed rivers that supply lowland cities. Their valleys host hydroelectric dams and, increasingly, solar farms. The mountains that threaten lives when they are crumbling under the pressure of our lifestyle are also indispensable to sustaining just that lifestyle.

Selective retreat seems inevitable; some villages will relocate or vanish, their ruins left to wolves and bears already reclaiming alpine pastures. Others will adapt, hardening infrastructure, rethinking tourism and pivoting toward renewable energy. Switzerland’s meticulous commitment to mobility — the buses, post roads and cable cars threading even the remotest hamlets — may no longer be a priority.

Policy debates here are already echoing beyond the Alps. Should the state subsidize life in shrinking mountain villages or prioritize investments in the lowlands? And what if the population of the Alps — 14 million people according to the Alpine Convention, spread over eight countries — was relocated? The urban centers around the alpine arch are already densely populated. Also, the flatland dwellers are by no means safe from the effects of global warming. They suffer from heatwaves, droughts, heavy rainfall and floods.

How should cultural heritage be weighed against escalating risk? And, most urgently, can any local adaptation succeed without global emissions cuts? In 2021, Swiss voters rejected a national CO₂ reduction law. Four years later, Blatten disappeared. The connection is not lost on climate scientists. In fact, the thawing of glaciers and the decline in permafrost as an effect of emissions was treated in the first IPCC report in 1990. Nevertheless, it took Swiss media awhile to acknowledge it. 

Blatten forces a painful acknowledgment; these mountains are no longer timeless. The changes unfolding in their ice and stone will outpace any nostalgia for the past. Yet full abandonment is equally unthinkable. The Alps are too central — geographically, culturally, spiritually — to let go.

Perhaps the task ahead is humbler: to stop pretending we can conquer the mountains and instead learn, belatedly, to live with their transformations. “I find solace in the fact that nature is stronger than humans,” says Berger.