Sports, but not as you know it. Nothing is ever quite as expected. Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service. If the story is wriggly, contentious or hard to tame, I’ll cover it. Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts, k two comfort. We made it. 8000 metres is summertime over there. Looks so close, but so far. I’m Adriana Brownlee and that’s me on the second highest mountain in the world. In 2022, I became the youngest woman to have climbed both Mount Everest and k two. I’m a mountaineer, someone who has dedicated their hobby, their career, their life to the mountains. When you’re literally on top of the world, you feel so small and you imagine the mountains to be there forever. But our mountains are changing and mountaineering is becoming more unpredictable because of climate change. And the people who live near these mountains are also at risk. For this edition of the documentary from the BBC World Service, I am taking you thousands of metres up into the clouds to explore the impact of climate change on the world of mountaineering. This is the approach. So today we’re off to Chamonix. We’re going to explore a little bit in the glaciers in the heart of the Alps. That’s where you have all the big players in the mountaineering world, live around there and train around there. So, yeah, it’s the epicentre for climbing. What does it mean to be a mountaineer? It means respecting the mountains. It means kicking into the snow with crampons, pulling yourself up frozen walls with ice axes, walking across sparse glaciers and going to places few have gone before you. For the most challenging climbs, you need a mountain guide. And they’re the people witnessing climate change taking place in the mountains on a daily basis. My name is Victor Saunders. I’m a mountain guide living here in Chamoni. The last 20 years, I guess I’ve seen climate change big time here. We live on the edge of the glaciers and the glaciers are where it shows most 1000 metres above Chamonis valley and on the northern slopes of the Montblanc, western Europe’s highest mountain, lies the myr de glass. It’s a glacier and its name means sea of ice in French. And that’s what a glacier can be described as, rivers of ice. You look down now, you see this huge v shape that’s like a kilometre across and actually it’s more than 500 metres, probably like a kilometre deep. It’s a 45 degree v that would have all been filled with ice when I was here for the first time. All of it filled with ice. Glaciers are usually found higher up in the mountains, where it’s colder. They are made up of snow, rock and ice that’s been compacted for hundreds and even thousands of years. And walking across them forms a key part of the approach, the journey to the summit. For a long time, it was thinning at about a metre a year. So it’s like boiling a frog. The frog doesn’t realise it’s been cooked because the temperature is going up very, very slowly and it may not jump out. And we actually are the frogs. We haven’t jumped out of the pot yet. But mountaineers aren’t just facing the threat of danger from climate change. The danger is now very real. So it started with very little noise. The rockfall just continued, the rocks becoming bigger and bigger. Pratik Guian Chandani works in tech and is based in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. He takes part in mountaineering expeditions as a hobby. And he told me how he was on his way down from summiting Mob Blanc on July 15, 2022, when he witnessed a huge rock fall on his descent. It’s like huge giant boulder, like a truck coming down at the speed of a Ferrari. I looked down in front and I wanted to see if there was no one in that path. We’re all shouting rock, rock, rock, just to let the people in front of us know that there’s a huge rock fall coming. Having been in some of these situations myself, I know how it feels, but were you worried for your life? Yes, I was a little bit scared, to be very honest. But that’s the nature of climbing mountains, right? You basically accept the risk and you try to minimise the risk. The Grand Coulois is one of the most dangerous sections of the classic route up to the summit of Mont Blanc, as it is prone to rockfall, like what pratique witnessed. Luckily, no one died there that day, but an average of four people die on this section every year. Scientists say warming mountain conditions because of climate change is leading to more rock falls, especially at times in the day when they were previously less expected. We started descending around 04:30 a.m. Which is quite early, and the idea is to, of course, minimise the risk of rock falls. However, just as we began the descent, a massive rockfall occurred. Somehow I was able to record it on camera, even though my guide was not happy about it. But I got it on video and I just gave it to the authorities. They took it very seriously. The mayor of Chamoni actually got to know about that video and they decided to close the mountain for a few weeks. And were there any other signs of climate change that you saw on Mont Blanc? It was just extremely hot. So, for example, I remember checking my altitude on my watch. I was at 4000 metres and I was in my t shirt and I was like, this is not right. There was actually a heat wave in Europe and we had a few people from the team who couldn’t climb because it was too hot for them. Has your behaviour changed as a mountaineer? I haven’t been to any mountains after that. I don’t know how to say it. I hope that answers the question. I just hope that we can create a world that our children can equally get the same joy that we got, right. So I hope they can see what we saw. Geography researcher and mountaineer Dr. Jacques Murray has been studying the effects of climate change on the mountaineering community for the past ten years. He takes me by cable car to the Agil Dumidi, a mountain where you can see the snow capped Mont Blanc and the mountain surrounding it, which is called the massif. Could you tell us a bit about where we are and what we’re seeing in general? We are on top of the Agri Dumidi at 3842 metres high and so we have a very, very nice view over the northern Alps, especially the Monblanc, which is right in front of us. And can you tell us about any specific research that you’ve done? Maybe something recent? One thing is I used a very, very famous guidebook for mountaineers called the Mumblan massive, the 100 finest roots. It’s a selection of routes that are supposed to be very beautiful and I compared the state of those routes as they are described in the guidebook for 1973, to their actual states nowadays, the Mont Blanc massif. The 100 finest roots was written by french mountaineer Gaston Rebuffer, who was born in 1921. And the book once held an almost mythical status in the french mountaineering community. Over the 100 routes we studied, there is actually 98 that are affected by climate change. And over those 100 there is the quarter that are not climbable anymore in summer. So I can give you an example of those routes that are not climbable in summer. Is La Toront right in front of us. At this point, Jacques points to a steep and tall mountain face with jagged black edges, which forms part of the Mont Blanc mountain range. It used to be a very classic phase to climb up a snowy route, steep around 50 degrees, but climbable all summer and rather easy for a mountaineer. There is some rock that used to be under the ice that are now exposed to the elements, and they are starting to fall down also because of permafrost forming. And this, we have many, many rock fall events during summer. So, well, more or less all those factors make it unclimable in summer for mountaineers. So could you tell me a little bit about the research that you did? On the hundred finest routes on the Mont Blanc massif. The main results is that we have identified 25 different processes, which is quite important. And on average, each of the routes we studied are affected by nine processes due to climate change. So it’s really a huge amount of processes, a huge amount of modifications for mountaineers in those routes. Jacques has identified a total of 25 processes or changes that are affecting the mountaineering routes on the Mont Blanc massif. I asked him to describe some of them. First is the melting glaciers. There is more frequent rock falls, especially due to melting permafrost or warming permafrost. And there is also something less known. It’s the melting of ice aprons. Ice aprons are small patches of ice usually found on steep terrain and at high altitudes. They are very, very important for mountaineers because they are usually the way we follow. We go from one of those ice prong to another, to another, and to be in the snow and find the easiest route. But as they are really melting very, very fast, well, some of the root disappear because those ice prong are completely melting. For the mountaineers, this hard ice is quite important. Right, in terms of anchors, ice climbing, can you tell us a bit more about that? Now that those ice separ are melting, it clearly modifies the way we can go out and practise mountaineering. First it’s more difficult, technically speaking, then it’s steeper. So again, it’s more difficult as the terrain is not glaciated anymore. It started rock falls from places that are recently unglaciated. So again, it’s more dangerous. Scientists are now predicting that two thirds of the world’s land based glaciers could disappear by the year 2100. And mountaineers are having to adapt as they melt. Mountain guide Victor Saunders again, a lot of routes that we used to do as ice routes with crampons and ice axes in August or July are impossible. Now. They’re just rubble heats. We respond to that by doing some of those routes in winter or in a different season. And a lot of the roots, also, because the glasses are thinning, they’re almost impossible to get onto the roots. The approaches have changed a lot over time. So changing the season, changing the variations on the route to be to more rocky areas and less icy areas, those are two of the ways that people adapt and also finding new routes that are more suitable for the new conditions in the mountains. It’s not just glaciers and surface level ice that is melting because of climate change, as Jacques mentioned, it’s the permafrost too, the ice deep within the mountain, which holds the mountain face together. So have you got any figures or data from your research on the permafrost, just to put in perspective a little bit what’s happening there? The main thing about permafrost is that as it gets warmer, the ice that is in the crack of the rock is melting. And this ice was having kind of a concrete, like, acting like concrete, sticking rocks together. And as it melts, well, there is more and more rock falls due to this warming permafrost. And there is also, even high in altitude, the temperature of the rock is getting warmer the more and more in depth in the rock. So we have larger events occurring, larger rock fall occurring as permafrost is warming very deep inside the mountain. Can you tell us a bit about what roles the mountains have in sort of symbolising this climate change? Well, I think mountains are a good symbol because in high mountain areas in the world, climate change is two times faster than it is at the global scale. So at the global scale, we are a little bit more than one degree of warming. And here, for example, in Chamoni, we are at 2.3 degrees. So, for example, for someone living in Paris or in Leon, who is living in a city, it’s probably difficult for him to really get what climate change means, because he’s not really affected on his everyday life. He hear it in the news, but he doesn’t feel it really in his body. If he comes here, he will feel it right away. And if for any reason he came when he was a kid and he come back 20 years later, he will not see the glaciers he saw, he will not see the snow he saw. So it’s really going to be a huge modification for him. So that’s why it’s a good thing to use mountain, to really show people that it’s real, it’s very fast, and what’s happening here, it’s going to be happening in a decade lower in the valleys. So, yeah, it can be a good trigger for people to understand that some actions are needed. I’m Adriana Brownlee and you’re listening to the approach from the BBC World Service. After visiting the Alps and speaking to Jacques, I’ve learnt that some mountain areas are changing rapidly, as they are heating twice as fast as the global average. I wanted to find out why this is. I’m Dr. Tom Matthews. I’m a senior lecturer in environmental geography at King’s College, London and a National Geographic explorer. It is well understood, well appreciated, that mountains are warming faster than the global average. And so is the arctic warming, much faster than the global average. And there is a common explanation for both to some extent. One, in colder places, more of the energy that we’re accumulating from greenhouse gas emissions gets channelled into increasing the air temperature. In some other places, like, for example, at lower elevations and over the oceans, it gets channelled into evaporating water. So part of why mountains and high latitudes, part of the reason why they warm faster is simply because they start off colder. But there’s also a more intuitive and also very important process going on, and that is a positive feedback. So as we get warming, what can happen is if we imagine, think of our mountain environment for a second, and we have an area, a region that in cold years is covered in snow for a large part of the year. In warmer years, it isn’t. As we warm up, the ground is no longer limited to being freezing point as the highest temperature it can reach. Now that sunlight can warm the ground up to essentially any temperature. So in places where we’re losing snow and ice, basically we can have these positive feedback that accelerate the warming trend. Warming. Less snow and ice means more warming means less snow, and ice means more warming. Dr. Matthews has spent the past four years installing and monitoring the world’s highest weather station near the summit of Mount Everest. What we’re doing at the moment is trying to establish what the baseline is. So what’s the current climate? That’s a really important thing to do. Telling the current climate or understanding the current climate helps us understand how sensitive the upper slopes of Everest that have never been monitored before, at least not monitored for very long before. And what those measurements are showing us is that the upper slopes of Everest are already quite close to melting, and in some cases, they are melting already. So around the western coombe, around camp two, we think there’s probably quite a lot of melt going on there during the monsoon, even though the air temperature is quite a bit below freezing. Still, what’s happening is the really strong sunshine is coming in and melting those snow and ice surfaces and bringing them up to a warmer temperature than the air above. So we probably are getting some melting there. And why that’s important is it shows that if the air temperature rises a bit more, we should see some more melting going on up there, not just warmer snow and ice. As mountains heat up, the conditions become more unpredictable for mountaineers. But that’s not Dr. Matthew’s only worry. There are going to be more challenges on the horizon for mountaineers as we see environments that soon will no longer have snow and ice in them year round, transforming, so they’ll become more unstable to climb through, et cetera. But the bigger challenge, or the bigger concern for me, is looking at the big picture, the changes to where humans can live long term that are very well underway. So mountaineering is a part of this, of course, and having interests in that field, of course, I’m worried about a hobby and interest that is dear to my heart, but it would be wrong of me to not recognise the much broader context that that specific challenge is set in. And we mustn’t lose sight of the big picture, even when we are addressing those things that are most dear to our hearts. 8840. Metres high and located on the border of Nepal and Tibet. No words can describe the feeling of reaching the summit of the world’s tallest mountain. But Mount Everest and the areas surrounding it are changing because of climate change. And the people who are on the front lines are the Sherpa, the ethnic group who mostly live in high altitude areas near the Everest region. I remember as a child in the morning, my grandmother taking coals and putting incense on top of it and the smoke just rising to the sky. Pasang Yangji, Sherpa is an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia whose family are from the Mount Everest region in Nepal. She remembers her grandmother’s daily buddhist ritual. On the one hand, it’s just a smoke and burning incense, but really, if we pay attention to it, it’s the smoke that’s rising and reaching the gods up in the mountains and up in the sky. For me, it symbolises how we are connected to the mountain gods. Thinking about the world’s highest mountain, Everest or Chomalongma, what spiritual meaning does this have for the Sherpa people and yourself? I’ve always heard people describe it as the goddess of wealth, goddess of prosperity. So Miu Lang Sangma, who resides on Zamalangma, is the deity we thank for the prosperity Sherpas have been able to enjoy. And I hear that again and again in the villages, but I also hear people being very careful about not bothering the deity too much. So when there are a lot of people on the mountain, a lot of pollution on the mountain, Sherpas do pay attention to that. How do you think mountaineering tourism is changing in Nepal? So definitely the number of people going on the expeditions have increased. And I think with social media and other forms of media, there’s also this race to the top. One way to think about it is the quality versus quantity. I think there are mountaineers who just want to go and get their trophy, and that’s the end of the story. And for me, if we look at the relationships between previous mountaineers and people they work with in the community, the mountain then becomes this way of building relationships, building friendships with the community. That’s the kind of relationship I don’t see as much, and that’s the kind of relationship I hope that mountaineering industry will continue to nurture. So what are the local people or the people of your village, what are they saying about climate change in the mountains? We have been getting unpredictable and unprecedented weather events. More rain or less rain or lack of snow or heavy snow. At times when it should not be snowing, for example. So these are the kinds of things people are really thinking about and noticing. And it’s hard to miss if you live there. Looking at the impact of climate change in the Sherpa community, can we take a deeper dive into the Sherpas who are actually mountaineering guides? How is it affecting them? I do talk to a lot of mountaineers and there are a lot of mountaineers in our community, as you know. And one thing that keeps coming up again and again is how the mountain itself has changed, how the glaciers and the ice and snow have changed. And so earlier, what I used to hear was a change at the timescale of like maybe decades. But now what I’m hearing increasingly is every season, people are noticing significant melting. So every time you go, you’re going to a different landscape almost. And all of this means more risk to people who have to go up and down the soft snow on the mountains. It means not being able to predict which route to take, how it’s going to be and what a particular mountaineering season is going to look like. And these are definitely causes for anxiety, if nothing else. And I keep imagining, when I’m thinking about mountaineers, Sherpa high altitude workers, for example, on the mountains, I cannot help but think about their families back home, renowned for their elite climbing abilities. There are more than 10,000 registered Sherpas working in the mountaineering industry in Nepal, which is a popular destination for mountaineers from Europe. But mountaineers such as myself are tourists. We are guests on the mountain and the country where the mountains are located. This means we have a responsibility to be good guests. Marta Mills is a sustainable tourism project manager based in the UK. I grew up in the mountains with the mountains. That’s where my dad is from. It’s southern Poland. And every time I go to the mountains, I look at them and I think they’ve been here forever and we’re just passing. I lost a very good friend recently. My good friend died of cancer. My first reaction was, I need to go to the mountains to make peace and to clear my head, to feel that, just to feel calm again. I also feel so calm in the mountains. In the past few years, I’ve witnessed mountaineering becoming more popular. Is this a trend you’ve also seen in your research? It has definitely become more popular over the last few years and particularly the last three years after Covid. So when you look at any sustainability trend in sort of in consumer behaviour, in tourist behaviour, one of the top one is always, people want to go into nature they want to go away from the crowd. So it’s definitely. Mountaineering is becoming more and more popular. It is. It seems to have just exploded in the past few years, which is really cool to watch, but obviously there are positives to it and there are also downsides to the whole thing. How do you think this increase has affected the mountains? Unfortunately, there are loads of negative impacts. So it’s waste. So it’s both human waste and also rubbish. If you just think of a very sort of empty, pristine space and suddenly put 100 people on it, there will be an impact. I’ve seen that you promote regenerative tourism. Can you tell me what that means? It’s a step up from sustainability, sustainable tourism. It’s a lot about minimising negative impact and sort of maximising positives. We’re not making it worse, whereas regenerative tourism is, to me, is that step up. It’s more about making the positive impact, so leaving the destination in a better state than before we came. And at the same time, regenerative tourism really place a lot of emphasis on the local communities. So when you plan tourism, you really have to consult, but not in those way of just go and tick boxes and ask people, do you want tourism or do you want from it? It’s more like it’s going deeper into what are the values of the local people? What do they really want from? I mean, first of all, do they actually want tourism? But if they do, what do they want from it? And how will tourism contribute positively to their lives? Not only looking is like, how can we minimise the negative impact, but how can we make it better? How can they benefit? How can the natural environment benefit and how can the local people benefit and actually then welcome tourism? When I first started mountaineering, it was all about the enjoyment and fulfilment from summiting a peak. But I quickly found myself planning my next expedition as soon as I got down to sea level. My eyes have now been opened to the changes that are happening on the mountains. It’s no longer just about the climb to the top from the roof of the world. I’ve been on the front lines of climate change. Yes, these mountains are precious to me as a mountaineer, but they are so much more. They’re connectors of people, home to many and symbols of the damage we continue to do to our planet. I’d like nothing more than for the next generation of mountaineers to be able to witness what I have from these magic kingdoms in the sky. You’ve been listening to the approach with me, Adriana Brownlee. The producer was Emily Uchida Finch, and it was a whistle down production for the BBC World Service. 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