Will Climate Change End the Winter Games?

Ahead of the Winter Olympics currently being held at Yanqing Ski Resort near Beijing, aerial shots of its artificially maintained ski slopes sticking out uncomfortably from the surrounding green hillsides spiked a conversation about the Winter Games and climate change. According to a scientific paper, the face of the Winter Olympics could in fact change majorly as many of the sites used for the event will no longer provide the right conditions if climate change continued to progress as it has.

According to research published in the journal Current Issues in Tourism, two thirds of all past and future Winter Olympic venues could become unreliable for the use in international competitions between 2071 and 2100 if the world continues on its current emissions trajectory. If instead it stuck to the Paris Emission goals, the share of unreliable venues would rise to 29 percent in the same time frame, up from 19 percent what would have already been unreliable between 1981 and 2010.

The Beijing Olympics are expected to be the first ones carried out on 100 percent artificial snow, decreasing the quality of the surface that skiers and snowboarders use. But the inability of venues to hold fair and safe competitions will also come from weather conditions like fog and wind, occurrence of rain, the need to chemically treat snow and scheduling problems in competition and training as snow is not a commodity that’s easily come by.

To arrive at their results, the researchers behind the release questioned internationally competing skiers, snowboarders and their coaches and compared statements on what would make competitions unsafe or unfair against climate models.

Taking a closer look at which venues could deteriorate in reliability by middle of the century, mostly European venues like Grenoble, Innsbruck, Turin and Cortina d’Ampezzo are affected. Other venues in Chamonix, Garmisch-Patenkirchen and Sochi were deemed unreliable from the start by the researchers. North American host locations, with the exception of California’s Squaw Valley, are only expected to become majorly unreliable if emissions continued unchanged until the end of the century. Japanese venues Sapporo and Nagano fare similar, while Pyeongchang in South Korea is also bound for snowless conditions sooner. Beijing received a mediocre rating from the researchers throughout the different scenarios.