An Alpine village an hour's drive outside Vienna was recently faced with a conundrum – it used to be known for its ski resort, but climate change was causing less and less snowfall to cover the mountain every year.

As a result, the village was witnessing a dramatic decrease in visitors. In 2014, Sankt Corona am Wechsel had just 25,000 annual visitors, down from 70,000 around 20 years earlier.

Then in 2014, Sankt Corona dismantled its winter infrastructure and turned to another downhill sport to fill the void: Mountain biking. It now gets 130,000 visitors per season.

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"We used to be a 100 percent winter destination. Now, we have to think about climate change, and summers are booming," Karl Morgenbesser, a former snowboard instructor who now runs the adventure park, told AFP.

Skiing accounts for around 3 percent of Austria's GDP, which could be a problem moving forward as Sankt Corona will not be the only village experiencing less snowfall because of climate change.

In the past 50 years, nearly a month's worth of snowfall has been lost at low and medium altitudes, according to a study published in The Cryosphere scientific journal in March.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] has also said that snow cover will continue to decrease in mountainous areas below 1,500 meters for the rest of the century. 

Perhaps Sankt Corona will not be the last resort to change its focus.