Retracting glaciers / Schlatenkees
The Schlatenkees in East Tyrol is the largest valley glacier in the region and part of the Venediger Group, framed by the Großvenediger (3,667m) and its neighbouring peaks within the core zone of the Hohe Tauern National Park. Between 1988 and 2018, the glacier retreated 470 metres in length — two-thirds of that loss after 2005. Its glacier front collapsed in 2014 and has been gone entirely since 2017.
The retreat has only accelerated since. In 2019, Schlatenkees lost nearly 70 metres. In the 2021/22 measurement year, it recorded the highest retreat of any glacier in Austria at 89.5 metres. The following year, another 92.8 metres — placing it among the top four fastest-retreating glaciers in the country. In 2023/24, it continued its decline.
Where ice once filled the valley, a proglacial lake now expands year by year. The glacier's lower tongue is disintegrating into the water, and the thinning icefall connecting the upper accumulation zone to what remains below grows weaker each summer. Glaciologists describe the lower section as effectively dead — cut off from the ice supply that once sustained it.
This body of work documents Schlatenkees across three visits: 2019, 2022, and 2024. Each return revealed dramatic, visible change — a glacier in the final stages of collapse, and a landscape being rewritten in real time.
Location: Schlatenkees, Venediger Group, Hohe Tauern National Park, East Tyrol, Austria

Glacier protection / Snow Farming
At Stubai glacier, commercial ski operations cover patches of ice with reflective blankets each summer — a practice known as snow farming — to slow melting and preserve the ski season. Only commercially valuable slopes receive this protection. In the background, the Zuckerhütl (3,507m), the highest peak of the Stubai Alps, and its surrounding natural glacier remain entirely exposed.
Location: Stubai glacier, Tyrol, Austria

Bark beetle
Bark beetles have devastated Austria's spruce forests, exploiting trees weakened by rising temperatures and prolonged drought. Spruce — fast-growing and commercially dominant — can no longer withstand the heat stress. Small-scale farmers like Gerhard B. in Upper Austria have watched entire sections of their woodlands disappear, taking decades of income and a way of life with them.
Location: Oberösterreich, Austria

Broken forest
Entire hillsides of fallen spruce have become a common sight across Austria. Weakened by drought and pest infestation, forests are increasingly vulnerable to the storms that climate change makes more frequent. What took decades to grow is destroyed in hours.
Location: Grosskirchheim, Carinthia, Austria

Torrents
In the summer of 2019, a single day of extreme rainfall turned a creek in Tennengau into a destructive torrent. Roads were severed, bridges torn apart, and the valley village was cut off for weeks. Across Austria, heavy rainfall events are becoming more frequent and more intense — a pattern consistent with the country's accelerating climate shift.
Location: Gossaubach & Tennengau, Salzburgerland, Austria

High water protection
Along the Danube, rising flood risk has forced heavy investment in protection infrastructure. At Spitz, near the town of Krems, concrete walls now line the riverbank — part of an extensive network of flood defence projects built across Lower Austria since the catastrophic floods of 2002.
Location: Spitz, Niederösterreich, Austria

Neusiedler See
Neusiedler See, Austria's second-largest lake and the closest body of open water to Vienna, is shrinking. The shallow steppe lake has dried out repeatedly throughout its recorded history, but rising temperatures and increasingly dry summers have made its retreat more persistent and harder to reverse. Beyond its cultural and commercial value, the lake sustains a rare and fragile ecosystem already under stress.
Location: Neusiedler See, Burgenland, Austria

Dying of Alpine pastures
Austria's alpine pastures are under threat from rising temperatures. As the climate warms, invasive plants colonise high-altitude meadows, overwhelming livestock and the farmers who maintain them. The workload of clearing encroaching vegetation is becoming unsustainable for small-scale alpine farmers. A centuries-old ecosystem and way of life is being quietly displaced.
Location: Vorarlberg, Austria

Formation of new lakes
Sulzenau See is a glacial lake that did not exist before 2003. That year, the Sulzenau glacier cracked and its meltwater changed course overnight, filling a basin where ice once stood. Across the Austrian Alps, the formation of new glacial lakes has accelerated eightfold since the end of the Little Ice Age — over 260 new lakes have appeared as glaciers retreat.
Location: Sulzenau See, Tyrol, Austria

Permafrost crack defence
At the Sonnblick observatory (3,106m), melting permafrost has destabilised the mountain itself. In July 2023, a record temperature of 15.7°C was measured at the summit. Concrete reinforcements were installed years ago to prevent the rock — and the observatory with it — from breaking apart. What was once a stable foundation is becoming unstable ground.
Location: Sonnblick, Salzburg, Austria

White rails
As summers intensify, steel railway tracks absorb heat and expand, risking dangerous buckling. In 2019, Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) painted a five-kilometre stretch of track near Bludenz in Vorarlberg with white paint to reflect sunlight and reduce rail temperatures by up to 5–8°C. The measure — also tested in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK — is one of a growing number of adaptations forced by a climate that existing infrastructure was never designed to withstand.
Location: Bludenz, Vorarlberg, Austria

Abandoned ski resorts
Across the Alps, over 600 ski areas have closed in recent decades. In Austria, smaller resorts at lower altitudes that relied entirely on natural snow have become economically unviable — unable to afford the snowmaking systems that larger competitors use to extend their seasons. Idle lift towers, empty slopes, and shuttered stations are becoming a familiar sight. Snow cover in the Alps has declined by nearly 10% since the 1970s, and the trend is accelerating. By mid-century, only 52–72% of Austrian ski areas are projected to remain snow-reliable.
Location: Austria

Agriculture under pressure
Austria's farmland is adapting in real time. Anti-hail netting shields vineyards and orchards from increasingly violent summer storms. Protective tunnel structures cover vulnerable crops. Irrigation systems spray fields that once relied on rainfall alone. These measures are becoming essential, not optional — a landscape being quietly re-engineered to cope with a climate that no longer behaves as it did a generation ago.
Location: Burgenland / Niederösterreich, Austria

Heat in the city
Vienna's summers are getting hotter. The number of days above 30°C and tropical nights above 20°C has risen significantly since 1900. Without emissions reductions, temperatures in the city could increase by a further 1.2 to 1.5°C by 2050. Public cooling infrastructure — like the water mist installations at the Karlskirche — offers relief, but it is adaptation, not solution.
Location: Vienna, Austria