European ski resorts most at risk of shutting down — ranked by a climate-and-viability exposure index built from 25 winters of real data (base altitude, thaw days, snow decline), summer wildfire exposure, and known financial fragility. Marginal regions: Greece, the Ardennes, Scandinavia's south, the Tatras, low French/German ranges, Scotland & more.
Resorts that stopped running lifts in recent years — the outcome the risk index is about. Indicative and worth verifying; some may run occasional community/nordic days.
A resort is generally considered economically viable if it can hold enough snow for roughly 100 skiable days a season. Low-altitude, southern and maritime resorts increasingly fall short as winters warm, and snowmaking only helps while nights stay cold enough — which is exactly what the thaw-days column tracks. The clearest, most robust risk signals here are base altitude, thaw frequency and known financial fragility; the absolute snowfall and the 25-year decline % are noisier (they depend on the model's grid-cell elevation and huge year-to-year swings in maritime spots), so treat those as supporting evidence, not gospel. This does not predict a specific resort will close — several here are propped up by municipalities, tourism boards or snowmaking investment. It flags where the underlying conditions for closure are strongest.
On wildfires: the Fire risk column is a susceptibility measure — mean summer heat (days ≥30 °C) plus drought (dry-day frequency) over 2015–2024 — showing where a forest fire is most likely to reach a resort's wooded lower slopes, access roads or base village. Mediterranean resorts (Greece, central Spain, the Apennines) score highest; cool, wet Scotland and Scandinavia lowest. It is not a claim that any resort here was burned: much ski terrain sits above the treeline, so fires more often hit access and base infrastructure than the pistes, and a fire only meaningfully raises closure risk where a marginal resort then can't fund rebuilding. The separate 🔥 confirmed-damage flag is not guesswork: it's set from live EFFIS/Copernicus burnt-area perimeters (JRC MODIS). A bright 🔥 means a burn scar from this calendar year falls inside the resort (×2) or within 3 km (×1) — only this drives a recovery-risk bump on top of the exposure score. A faded 🔥 marks a burn in the previous few years, shown for context with no score penalty (e.g. a resort that stood in a 2,740 ha 2025 burn but saw no new fire this year). Hover either flag for the fire's date, size, country and distance.