’Valais is an ideal laboratory to study climate change impacts’

Jérôme Chappellaz © Jean-Yves Vitoux, Institut polaire français IPEV Exploring the climate crisis with Jérôme Chappellaz, environmental scientist and academic director of ALPOLE at EPFL. Addressing global warming will require politics, industry and academia to develop new, innovative ways of working together, says Jérôme Chappellaz, head of the Ferring Pharmaceuticals Margaretha Kamprad Chair in Environmental Sciences at EPFL. The academic director of EPFL's Alpine and Polar Environmental Research Centre (ALPOLE) in Sion, regards the canton of Valais as an ideal laboratory to study impacts of and solutions to address our shrinking Alpine glaciers. We spoke with Chappellaz about his concerns and hopes for the future, both in Switzerland and around the world. Jérome Chappellaz, will there still be ice in Switzerland in 2100?. It depends on how much greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere. If we stabilize our emissions and limit warming to the 1.5-degree target set at the COP21 climate conference, then only half of our glaciers will disappear.