Climate change is reshaping the Winter Olympic Games

Climate change is reshaping the Winter Olympic Games, as declining snowfall and rising temperatures in key locations spark concerns about the feasibility of where the global sporting event can be held in future. 

This year’s Winter Olympic Games held in northern Italy have put particular focus on the effect on Europe, the fastest-warming continent.

Heavy snow fell on the key venue of Cortina d’Ampezzo earlier this week, disrupting training, but on a long-term basis both the accumulation of snow and number of cold days have been steadily declining across Europe.

FT analysis of National Snow and Ice Data Center data shows that many of the main mountain ranges in Europe — the Alps, Carpathians and Apennines — have experienced a reduction in snow cover of 50 percentage points or more over the past 20 years.

In Cortina, there are almost one-fifth fewer freezing days annually compared with the decade after the 1956 Games, which it last hosted, according to Climate Central, the green non-profit research group.

Temperatures for February were an average of 3.6C hotter than 70 years before, based on 2025 data, far ahead of the global rate of warming of about 1.4C above pre-industrial levels.

“Climate change is reshaping winter sport as we know it,” said Julie Duffus, head of sustainability at the International Olympic Committee, the body overseeing the Games. 

Research carried out for the IOC said the number of viable host countries for the Winter Games globally could be reduced to just 10 by 2040 as a result of shrinking snowfall and unpredictable weather.  

A study by researchers at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) said the alpine area where this year’s Olympics are taking place faced a potential 9.5 per cent decrease in the snow cover days, where the snow is deep enough to sustain winter sports.

It also predicted a drop of almost 38 per cent in the number of days in which snow falls during the 2036-2065 period under a “medium” emissions scenario, where some policy measures are deployed to address climate change.

Paola Mercogliano, co-author and principal scientist at CMCC, said the winter sports sector needed “to adapt to rapidly changing climatic conditions”. 

“These numbers seem to suggest that artificial snow cannot be the main solution, because high temperatures do not allow it to persist for long, with obvious consequences for energy, economic and environmental costs.”

Italy is already considered a world leader in snow-making, with about 90 per cent of its ski slopes dependent on artificial snow. This process can be both water- and energy-intensive. 

“Nowadays, it is unheard of that a season is made up of only natural snow,” said Valeria Ghezzi, president at Anef, the association of ski lift operators in Italy.

The country has already run into problems relying on artificial snow, however, including in the Apennines, the long chain of mountains and hills that run down Italy, in years when there was too little snow and it was too warm to fire up the snow cannons.

For the Olympics, large reservoirs have been created to provide water for snow-making, although the organising committee said last month that it had produced less technical snow than forecast.

The IOC said sensors were being used to monitor snow depths in real time, preventing unnecessary production, while modern snow-making systems reduced electricity use by 30 per cent, required less water than older systems, and did not use chemical additives.

At the same time as being hit by climate change, the Olympics event is also responsible for creating additional greenhouse gases. A study published this month in the Geographical Journal found that past Winter Olympics were responsible for between 1mn and 1.5mn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, akin to the combined emissions of more than 300,000 cars driven for a year. 

“Milano-Cortina 2026 is often framed as a return to the traditional Alps, but it is a technologically manufactured reality,” said David Gogishvili, lead author of the study from the University of Lausanne.

The infrastructure “required to maintain the illusion of a reliable winter . . . contributes to the very climate deterioration that is making traditional mountain environments a scarce resource”, he said.