- 1 Similar events caused by rising temperatures at high altitudes and increased precipitation have mad (...)
1On 28 May 2025, a huge landslide buried Blatten, the highest village in the Lötschental valley in the Swiss canton of Valais. For weeks, whole sections of the 3,341-metre-high Kleines Nesthorn had been falling onto the Birch Glacier, accelerating its movement and ultimately causing it to collapse, hurling ice and rocks into the valley. The risk of this event happening had been identified by several scientific studies, which primarily attributed it to global warming: this is another place where, as elsewhere, the permafrost is thawing and loosening the high-mountain rock material that it held together. But in the days that followed, two controversies arose: one involving a challenge to the role of climate change in this event, and the other concerning the proposal to abandon human occupation of the high valleys most threatened by rockfalls and mudslides, which have recently become more frequent in the Swiss Alps.1 These two controversies point to a common issue: while climate change-related disasters call for mitigation measures with a view to socioenvironmental transition, denial of their causes and rejection of some of the proposals for dealing with them in the future demonstrate the strength of resistance to taking this path.
Domidimo, Attribution-Swisstopo, via Wikimedia Commons
2The Blatten disaster had therefore been anticipated. A recent scientific publication, based on work carried out by a team from ETH Zurich (Kenner et al. 2022), had even included the village on the map of the sites most threatened by permafrost thawing in Switzerland, and monitoring devices set up on site had enabled the movement of the rock masses to be tracked accurately. In light of the risk, the emergency services had also evacuated the area a few days before. Only one person – a resident of a neighbouring hamlet – was killed on 28 May.
Hadi, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
3Yet as is often the case in such situations, people were still mentally unprepared for the disaster despite the warnings from scientists and the emergency services. Although it had been anticipated, the scale of the glacier’s collapse took everyone by surprise. Once the initial shock had passed, a powerful wave of emotion and collective generosity swept through the entire Swiss population. Tens of millions of francs were raised to help the victims, and the cantonal and federal authorities quickly moved to approve funding to rebuild Blatten, which many people felt passionately about in response to the trauma caused by its destruction. This wave of emotion and solidarity was not a surprise, since previous disasters had produced similar responses. More generally, many anthropologists and experts on Swiss history have emphasised the Swiss population’s attachment to the Alps, particularly since the second half of the nineteenth century. Some have even identified these mountains as a pillar of national identity that, together with the attachment to semi-direct democracy, is capable of uniting populations that speak different languages and practice different religions (Walter 2016; Rudaz and Debarbieux, 2013).
- 2 For, if we are to persist in using this distinction, the glacier collapse in Blatten can clearly be (...)
4At first glance, these two initial observations – regarding the anticipation of the disaster, and the response to it by the Swiss population – appear to have little in common other than the event itself. Each analysis draws on a specific body of knowledge – the first relates to the natural and anthropogenic causes of the disaster,2 and the second to its immediate impact in terms of collective emotions and public action – but are both based on recognised scientific expertise. And yet the two controversies that emerged in the days following the disaster paid little attention to this knowledge. To understand why, we need to look at these two controversies in more detail.
5An initial wave of controversial comments expressed scepticism about the role of global warming in triggering the disaster. Several local, cantonal and federal officials made statements designed to convey doubt about this issue. Their statements to the press were connected less by a direct denial of the reality of global warming – which most of them were careful not to give – than by a shared desire to normalise the event itself and to subtly challenge its anthropogenic origin.
6Karin Keller-Sutter, president of the Swiss Confederation and a member of Switzerland’s main right-wing liberal party, visited the scene of the disaster on 30 May, and was asked about its causes by the media. She replied:
I do not want to speculate at this stage about the causes of this event. For as long as our country has existed, the population has been aware of the risks involved in living in mountainous regions... this is not the first time we have experienced a disaster caused by water or the mountains (Jotterand, 31 May 2025).
7The following day, Marcel Dettling, chair of the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC), the country’s main right-wing populist party, stated that “in the face of natural disasters of this magnitude, human beings are powerless,” and went on to list a series of what he considered comparable events:
After the landslides in Goldau (Schwyz) in 1806 and Elm (Glarus) in 1881, no one talked about human-induced climate change. Events like these are inevitable in our mountains (quoted in Schmid, 1 June 2025).
8Finally, there was great interest in the comments made by Beat Rieder, a former president of a neighbouring municipality to Blatten who belongs to another centre-right party and is a leading figure in the Council of States, the upper house of the Swiss Parliament. A few days before the disaster, Rieder had instigated a challenge from the Council of States to a European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruling that Switzerland was not doing enough to combat global warming. Rieder was therefore in high demand from the media in the aftermath of 28 May, and displayed a similar naturalistic fatalism:
All human beings are powerless against these natural forces... An event like this happens once every 1,000 years (quoted in Arcinfo, 29 May 2025).
- 3 For example, votes on preserving biodiversity (September 2024) and respecting planetary boundaries (...)
9Here it is important to note that the parties to which the above politicians belong tend to resist proposals designed to mitigate the impact of human activities on the environment, or are even – in the case of the UDC – openly against them. It should also be noted that, although there is no record of any comments being made by the population of Blatten on the subject, electoral results in recent years show they have systematically rejected the adoption of measures in this area by very clear majorities.3
- 4 While it is generally understood that a hazardous event can rarely be explained by a single cause, (...)
10Several scientists were disturbed by the public expression of climate scepticism by leading politicians, and made this view known, sometimes using language that markedly departed from the usual caution displayed in scientific publications. In an interview four days after the disaster, one famous Zurich glaciologist highlighted a single cause of the event, when it was in fact multifactorial4:
The only possible explanation is the role of ground ice and glaciers, which react quickly to temperature conditions (quoted in Delbecq, 31 May 2025).
11In a scientific blog post published ten days after the disaster, a climate change modelling expert took a more balanced approach:
Considering all these processes, it would be absurd, ignorant or dishonest to claim that human-induced warming did not play a role in the disastrous avalanche of ice and rock that destroyed Blatten (Huggel, 6 June 2025).
- 5 Although highly representative of the criticism of the policy of support for Alpine regions, which (...)
12A second controversy was simultaneously triggered by comments of a different kind made by individuals from liberal economic and political circles, which have a particularly strong presence and influence in Geneva and Zurich. While these figures were generally less hostile than the right-wing politicians to invoking the role of climate change in the events of recent years, they drew very different conclusions. This was strikingly highlighted in the main Swiss daily newspaper promoting this liberal discourse – the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) – on two occasions in the days following the disaster.5
13On 31 May 2025, the NZZ published an editorial by its editor-in-chief, Beat Balzli, in which he referred to the psychoanalytical “repression” that he felt some stakeholders were displaying in the aftermath of the disaster to avoid facing reality. Recognising that “such incidents are becoming more frequent due to the climate”, particularly in the Alps, Balzli suggested that economic consequences should be drawn from this, even if it meant questioning the kind of pact that binds the Swiss people to their mountains: these “incidents [...] undermine willingness to pay for the myth of the Alps. [...] Mountain cantons currently receive a great deal of money via fiscal equalisation and burden-sharing. Protective structures are very expensive for society.” Rhetorically, the editorial then asked “should the factor of proportionality [between costs and benefits] be reintroduced into the calculation?” and went on to answer its own question: due to the costs of providing services and protecting homes, it is necessary to consider abandoning human occupation of the most threatened high Alpine valleys. This economic argument amounted to a rejection of the principle of giving financial support to certain aspects of Alpine infrastructure, activities, and communities, despite the long tradition of this support in Switzerland.
- 6 Examples include the Swiss Flood and Landslide Damage Database, run by the Swiss Federal Institute (...)
14Even if we opted to take this economic approach, it is important to note that none of the estimates – which are currently very rough – of the cost of the investment needed to protect infrastructure and populations compare the situations in the Alpine valleys with those in the rest of the country. Studies conducted by the Federal Office for the Environment, research institutes and insurance companies show that floods, hail and storms also have considerable costs outside mountain regions.6 Furthermore, as is often the case, these estimates do not take into account the environmental costs and benefits themselves in these different contexts, which severely penalises the Alpine regions since they make a significant contribution to the benefits. This economic argument is not therefore currently supported by the robust, comprehensive evidence required to take it seriously.
15The day before this editorial was printed, the NZZ had published a long interview with Rieder (30 May 2025). The aim was not to pit two views of the role of climate change in the Blatten disaster against each other, but to give Rieder an opportunity to set out his proposals for the future of his valley and for high Alpine valleys in general, while challenging him on them.
- 7 In the wake of this controversy, Avenir Suisse, having previously contributed to proposals of this (...)
- 8 In the early 2000s, this work led by Basel-based architects and by researchers from ETH Zurich prod (...)
16Aware that Rieder was in favour of rebuilding the village, the interviewer suggested several times that the “Swiss public” might not consider it appropriate “to build new homes in a high valley [...] as the abandonment of villages and valleys is regularly the subject of debate.” But while such discussions have indeed been held in Switzerland since the late twentieth century, they are driven less by the population – most of whom support what the newspaper’s editor-in-chief would refer to the following day as the “myth of the Alps” – than by media outlets such as the NZZ, think tanks such as Avenir Suisse,7 and a handful of economists (see Schneider 2004, and Frey 2010) and spatial planning experts (see Diener et al. 2010).8
17Notably, Rieder invoked two different principles in this interview. First, he also drew on economic rhetoric, but combined it with other arguments to make the case that maintaining populations in the high Alpine valleys is in the public interest, since these populations contribute to the quality of the landscape and thus to the tourist appeal of the Alps, and help to maintain environments that regulate the flow of rivers passing through Switzerland’s major cities downstream. Second, he invoked arguments based on social justice:
Switzerland is made up of different towns and villages, linguistic regions, cantons and ways of life. Solidarity and balance are the foundations of our state. They ensure the cohesion of the country. If we abandon these principles, our state will gradually collapse... If some people were to consider leaving the high valleys for economic reasons, it would mark the beginning of a process of decline.
- 9 See, for example, the interview given by Thomas Egger, director of the Swiss Centre for Mountain Re (...)
18This argument is similar to the positions expressed by the Swiss Centre for Mountain Regions (SAB), an influential lobby group in Swiss mountain policy,9 and by the Parliamentary Group for Mountain Populations. In an interview on German-language public television, Simon Stadler, the chair of this group and a national councillor for the canton of Uri, said:
We mountain dwellers want to live here, and we must do everything we can to make it possible for the people of Blatten to return. And for the inhabitants of other valleys in Switzerland to be able to keep living there (Ackerman, 1 June 2025).
19Juxtaposing the two types of reactions examined above clearly reveals differences, if not oppositions, between them. They differ in their initial diagnosis: normalising the disaster on the one hand, and identifying the need for a radical response on the other. They also differ in their approach to collective identities: while liberals propose breaking with (or at least weakening) the centuries-old tradition of supporting mountain regions, others call for its continuation, including in the form of an emergency response to disasters. It is clear that we are dealing here with a conflict between two political imaginaries, a conflict that is likely to intensify in the coming years.
20However, the diagnoses underlying these two positions also have features that bring them closer together. The main one is a shared distrust of scientific expertise: the proponents of a form of climate scepticism pay little attention to research on environmental change, while the advocates of the liberal mindset pay little attention to research by social scientists that emphasises how attachment to the mountains and their populations continues to play a fundamental role in the national imaginary. While national imaginaries can, like the climate, change over time, it is striking that these liberals offer no alternative to this major component of Swiss identity.
21We can therefore draw two conclusions from the Blatten disaster.
- 10 The Confederation’s funding of scientific research is based on three main instruments managed by th (...)
- 11 Public policies implemented in this context have focused on areas such as environmental protection, (...)
- 12 On her personal website, Jasanoff provides the following definition: “Civic epistemologies are the (...)
22The first relates to the role of scientific expertise in public policy and democratic debate in Switzerland, and the threats it currently faces. For more than a century, the extensive research conducted in Switzerland on mountain environments, populations and economies has enabled the relevant institutions to develop globally recognised expertise (for a summary of this see Debarbieux and Rudaz, 2010, Chapter 8). The observations made at the beginning of this article – the fact that the Blatten disaster was anticipated by geologists, and the swift response of the Swiss population in accordance with the findings of social scientists – attest to the accuracy and relevance of such research. These studies were made possible by a particular focus from organisations funding public research,10 notably because of its value in developing public policy.11 From this point of view, the Swiss case is a particularly good illustration of sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff’s proposed concept of “civic epistemology”,12 which aims to account for the fact that, contrary to common belief, scientific practices, including those relating to environmental issues, are not independent of the dominant political imaginaries in the context in which they are conducted. Jasanoff shows that scientific expertise in general, and on environmental issues in particular, has been constructed “in the crucible of national imagined communities in accordance with prior commitments to reason, due process and social justice” (Jasanoff, 2010, p. 240). Applied to Switzerland, this concept of civic epistemology helps explain the shared desire of scientists and policymakers to develop a detailed understanding of mountain realities on which to base public policy, including in order to address the consequences of environmental change and design appropriate transition policies.
23The second conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that both climate scepticism and unabashed liberalism pose a threat to this political and scientific capital, and ultimately to the prospect of implementing transition policies in the context of global environmental change. While the sudden, dramatic nature of the Blatten disaster may help raise collective awareness of the effects of climate change, climate sceptical discourse has the opposite effect. And although the fact that the disaster took place in an iconic valley in the Swiss Alps could also pave the way for the adoption of transition policies that ensure the perpetuation of the “Alpine myth” while adapting it to contemporary challenges, unabashed liberal rhetoric advocates a completely different scenario.
24We can, however, counter these threats in a number of different ways. First, we need to further develop the kind of civic epistemology that has shaped major expertise on mountain environments and populations in Switzerland, in light of the changes observed. Second, we need to help the most vulnerable populations understand these changes, of which they are both the cause and the victims, since the violent nature of this kind of disaster can play a useful role in raising awareness. Finally, we need to resist, through demonstration, discourses that divert attention away from and undermine any discussion about the transitions that the Swiss people and politicians must undertake in order to cope with these changes, while safeguarding their attachment to the territory and their sense of belonging.