Is global warming dooming snow sports and the Winter Olympics?

MILAN –

Michele Comi is a geologist, mountain guide and Alpine skiing instructor from Chiesa in Valmalenco, a town 900 meters above sea level that sits at the mouth of a valley in the central Italian Alps, a region renowned for its skiing.

Comi recalls how, growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, children would go sledding in the meadow outside of what today is his studio every winter. “Kids with sleds have since disappeared, not because they don’t enjoy sliding downhill anymore, but because there isn’t any snow.”

This is just one of the many “visible signs” of how Alpine landscapes have transformed under the pressure of climate change. One only has to look at a thermometer to realize how “obvious” these shifts are, Comi says.

One hundred kilometers east of Comi’s hometown lies Cortina d’Ampezzo, one of the key clusters of the Milano Cortina Olympics and Paralympics. In the 70 years since the mountain town first hosted the Winter Games, mean February temperatures have warmed by 3.6 degrees Celsius.

Earlier this winter, Cortina and other Olympic venues across the Italian Alps experienced unseasonably warm weather and low snowfall. A fact hanging heavy not just over this year’s organizers, but future ones too, as the next Winter Games are set to be held just across the border, in the French Alps, in 2030 — the edition that Sapporo was vying to host before withdrawing its unpopular bid two winters ago.

Comi likens investments in ski resorts to “keeping a corpse alive,” a sentiment often heard in public and private discussions across Europe. For many, snow sports and, by extension, the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, are doomed by global warming: While the European Alps provide a stark case in point, even winter wonderlands such as Hokkaido are not immune.

Whether this future will soon materialize, however, isn’t as clear-cut as poignant images of brown meadows next to pistes white with artificial snow may lead us to believe. Mountain tourism and the Winter Games are finding ways — both old and new — to adapt to a warming planet, though the slope remains a slippery one.

Winter in the Alps goes downhill

One of the first ski lifts in Comi’s valley opened in 1959. “It changed the valley’s socioeconomic destiny,” he says, recognizing how the skiing boom in the decades that followed allowed mountain communities to “come out of darker, harder times.”

But the ski area stopped operating over a decade ago (save for limited reopenings) due to the lack of snow. “This small station is a symbol of skiing as a 20th-century phenomenon,” Comi says.

The shuttering of ski resorts, particularly at lower elevations, is a familiar story across the Alps. While Italy has over 280 of them, mostly in the Alps, an almost equal number, 265, lay abandoned. In France, 186 have shut. In Japan, by comparison, there are still over 400 active ski areas, though this is way down from around 700 that operated in the heyday of its bubble economy.

While the factors leading up to such closures vary, rising temperatures undoubtedly play a part, both in Japan and in Europe. On average, the Alps have warmed by 2 C over the last 120 years, double the rate at which temperatures have risen across the globe — with one scientific paper labeling this region a climate change “hot spot.”

Since the 1970s, mean snow depth across the Alps has declined by over 8% per decade and the snow season is up to 34 days shorter below 2,000 meters. In a worst-case emissions scenario, these mountains could lose half of their snow cover by the end of this century.

Warmer winters affect snow patterns in several ways, says Paola Mercogliano, principal scientist at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC). “The first impact is on precipitation, which falls as rain rather than snow.” Plus, snow doesn’t last as long and is more concentrated at higher altitudes.

To adapt to these circumstances and salvage the ski holidays of millions, the tourism industry has increasingly turned to artificial snow, with 90% of Italian slopes relying on it.

Many are alarmed by snowmaking’s cost and its environmental footprint, given heavy water and energy use, and adverse impacts on biodiversity — for example, the presence of more minerals in artificial snow can lead to overfertilized soil. However, the extent of such impacts is highly context-dependent, according to a 2024 paper.

In Livigno, where the snowboard and freestyle skiing events of the Milano Cortina Olympics are being held, one of Europe’s largest reservoirs for snowmaking was built in preparation for the Games. Yet in December, concerns emerged that artificial snow would not be ready in time for the event due to delays in part caused by the relatively high temperatures recorded up to that point.

Snowmaking, which requires wet-bulb temperatures of minus 2 C or less, may increasingly not be an option as the planet warms. A 2024 study co-authored by Mercogliano that looks at Belluno province, where Cortina is, not only found that snow cover days could decrease by one-tenth by mid-century, but the number of days suitable for snowmaking could plummet by 40%. As a result, ski-lift operators could lose over €9 million ($10.7 million) in revenue by 2065.

Climate-proofing the Winter Games

While disappointing winter seasons become more common in the Alps, an ever-greater number of international snow-seekers are flocking to Japan. Yet here too, the future of snow sports may not be as bright as soft carpets of glistening “powder” may suggest.

A widely cited 2024 study assessed whether 93 potential locations around the world would have suitable enough snow and temperature conditions to host the Winter Games in the future. Out of these, 52 would be able to host the Olympics in the 2050s, and 46 could do so in the 2080s in a medium-emissions scenario (one in which countries largely abide by their climate commitments, with average temperature increases by 2100 expected to be around 2 C to 3 C compared with pre-industrial levels). In both cases, several locations in East Asia, including Hokkaido, would be suitable.

But if the Winter Paralympics, which are held later in the season, in March, are factored in, these numbers fall dramatically. For example, none of the East Asian locations would have enough snow and low enough temperatures to host in the 2080s.

Despite this, one of the study’s co-authors has a reassuring message.

“We see an impact … but it’s not that climate change will put an end to winter tourism or the Olympics” over the next decades, says Robert Steiger, associate professor at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, which hosted the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics. “When we include snowmaking, we see that we will still have skiing.”

Artificial snow has already become key to the Winter Games’ climate adaptation strategy and has been used at every edition since 1980. Forgoing it “is no more an option than is moving hockey, figure staking, and curling back outside,” Steiger and colleagues write in a recent paper.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is also thinking more broadly about how to salvage the future of the competition. “When you start looking at parts of the world that are potentially interested in hosting a Youth Olympic Games or an Olympic Games, we have to look at the climate,” IOC President Kirsty Coventry said in the lead-up to the Milano Cortina opening ceremony.

So much so that the IOC has updated its host-selection criteria, requiring that Winter Games snow competitions be held in places that are likely to have reliable conditions by mid-century. And researchers such as Steiger have formulated more radical proposals, such as decoupling the locations of the Olympics and Paralympics, which have been held in the same place since 1992.

It’s undeniable that the lack of natural snow and warmer temperatures will transform winter sports. “This year, I heard from several Olympic teams that really had big problems with the training sites because … there wasn’t enough snow,” says Steiger, whose research shows that the vast majority of athletes are very concerned about the impact of climate change on their sport.

And as snow-based recreational activities become more niche, in part due to the higher costs associated with snowmaking, it’s likely that fewer people will engage in them at all.

Winter sports and their flagship competitions may not need to disappear entirely but will surely have to change significantly, potentially beyond recognition. At least this is what is suggested by plans — now postponed — to hold the 2029 Asian Winter Games in Saudi Arabia, in a ski resort built in the desert as part of the futuristic (some say dystopian) Neom mega-city.

From the vantage point of Cortina and the other Alpine locations where the world’s top winter sports athletes are now competing, one thing is certain: The future holds less snow.

Whatever happens in the next few decades, it’s unlikely that we’ll see the snowscapes witnessed by previous generations, CMCC’s Mercogliano points out. Even in a low-emissions scenario, a reduction in snow in the Alps is inevitable, though — crucially — it could be less severe. “We can’t reverse the trend, but we can significantly reduce its magnitude,” Mercogliano states.