Alpine climate · Vote 14:9
Canton votes to buy back its own meltwater as glaciers retreat past the record line
A 340-million-franc concession turns snowmelt into a public asset — and hands the high valleys their first real leverage over the hydro companies that have tapped them for a century.
The vote was close enough that the town hall kept the lights on until two in the morning, but by the time the last of the twelve communes reported, the arithmetic had turned. Fifty-eight per cent of the valley's electorate agreed that the meltwater leaving their slopes should be counted, priced and held in trust rather than simply sold at the turbine gate.
For the hydro operators the result is less a defeat than a new kind of bill. Under the concession, the canton becomes the legal holder of a share of every cubic metre that leaves the upper basin between May and September, and it can either sell that share back or bank it against a dry year. In practice the companies will keep generating; they will simply pay a rent that floats with the snowpack.
Officials in Bern have watched the experiment with unusual interest. Three other cantons have comparable votes scheduled before the winter session, and a federal working group has already asked for the draft text. The mechanism is not complicated: a satellite-derived snow line, a gauging station at the gorge, and an annual settlement that either fills a fund or draws it down.
Not everyone is convinced. The grid operators argue that a floating rent makes long-term investment harder to model, and that the first dry summer will test the fund's reserves. The canton's reply is blunt — the reserve exists precisely because the snow has stopped being reliable.