As climate change leaves snowfall less reliable, the organizers of the Winter Olympics and Paralympics will need to adapt to keep the games viable, researchers said this week. In a research letter published online on January 20, scholars from three universities said that organizers should consider holding the games earlier in the winter or selecting more reliably cold host cities to ensure that athletes can compete.
In the new analysis, Daniel Scott of the University of Waterloo, Robert Steiger of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Madeleine Orr at the University of Toronto examined 93 past and potential Winter Olympics and Paralympics host venues, drawing on work published by Steiger and Scott in 2024.
Even with snowmaking assumed to remain part of the picture, they found that only 45 to 55 of the 93 sites would still be climate-reliable by the 2050s, and only 30 to 54 by the 2080s, depending on how much we warm the climate in the coming decades. The outlook for the March-timed Paralympics is even more worrisome.
Rapidly warming winter temperatures and vanishing snow have already disrupted athletic competitions around the world.
- In 2022-23, all but one of the first eight World Cup competitions in skiing/snowboarding were canceled due to a lack of snow. In 2023-24, the tally of competitions lost to inadequate snow rose to 26 World Cup events across five categories.
- The FIS Freestyle Skiing World Cup aerials and moguls had been scheduled for January 16-18, 2025, in Park City. But with northern Utah plagued by record warmth and lackluster snowfall this winter, the events got moved to New York and New Hampshire.
Rocky Anderson, who served as mayor when Salt Lake City hosted the Games in 2002, expressed deep skepticism about the city’s next scheduled turn in 2034.
“I don’t think we’re going to see a Winter Olympic Games in Utah in 2034,” Anderson said in a video produced for Climate Central.
Of the sites chosen by the International Olympic Committee for the next three Winter Olympics – northern Italy in 2026, the French Alps in 2030, and the Salt Lake City area in 2034 – all are deemed “climate-reliable” for the time being, Scott said.
“When we say climate-reliable, that means, ‘Can you deliver the high-quality snow for competition 90% of the time,’” Scott said. “We’re never saying that’s foolproof … We’re using the best available scenarios, but that’s not to say climate change couldn’t throw yet another curve ball at future hosts.”
A long history of winter weather woes
Weather and its vagaries have loomed large over the Olympic Winter Games throughout their 102-year history. Weather was considered the most dangerous risk when potential insurers scrutinized the first winter games, held in Chamonix, France, in 1924. And rains with temperatures above 50°F arrived on the third day of the 1928 Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland, forcing some rounds of speed skating and bobsledding to be canceled.
The inherent risks of such dependence on snow and cold are now mushrooming as human activity warms the global climate. Many events have already moved indoors over the last few decades – figure skating did so in the 1960s – and for the outdoor games as they’re now carried out, snowmaking is virtually essential.
It’s still reliably frigid and snowy in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, such as the Canadian Arctic and northern Siberia. But the Winter Olympics depend on major infrastructure and transport networks to get competitors and spectators in place, so host cities tend to be on the warm margins of snow-friendly climates. And these are precisely the areas where warm spells are not just eroding the edges of reliable snow season, but melting holes in the middle of it.
A record-warm January made ski slopes slushy near Vancouver, British Columbia, as the 2010 games approached. Truckloads of snow had to be called in to save the day.
Nerves are jangling again ahead of the 2026 winter games, scheduled for February 6-22 in Milan, Italy. In December 2025, temperatures ran close to 5°F (3°C) above average. Uphill at the ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, warm days hindered snowmaking for weeks on end. The 2026 Winter Paralympic Games follow the Olympic Winter Games on March 6-15, a month when warm-weather risks grow even bigger.
This winter in northern Italy isn’t a weird one-off. When averaged on a decadal basis, Cortina’s February temperature rose from 19.3°F in 1956-65 to 27.1°F in 2016-25, according to analysis from Climate Central. And Cortina is far from an exception. A 2014 analysis led by Mark Rutty at the University of Waterloo, Canada, found that the average daytime temperatures at Winter Olympics host venues have climbed from 0.4°C (33°F) during the mid-20th century to 7.8°C (46°F) in the games held from 2002 through 2010.
Adapting to the new winter reality
The new paper by Scott and colleagues presents an array of 18 options that could help the games better adapt to a warming world. Nine of those involve where and when the full Winter Olympics and Paralympics are held. For example:
- Considering a regional, multi-country host to ensure climate-reliable competition sites (e.g., the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada, or the Tyrol region of the European Alps)
- Shifting to a rotating system among the few most climate-reliable locations
- Shifting the Winter Olympics forward two weeks, which would allow the Paralympics to start in late February instead of the more climate-fraught period of mid- to late March
The nine other options rely on technological and event-scheduling tweaks, such as:
- Stockpiling snow from the previous winter
- Extending the length of the games (from 16 to 18-20 days) to allow for schedule flexibility as needed
- Maximizing the use of state-of-the-art weather forecasting
The Winter Paralympics were originally held at different venues from the Winter Olympics but with similar midwinter timing. Starting in 1992, the two events went to a “one bid, one city” model, with the Paralympics following the Olympics by several weeks. Yet the delayed timing of the Paralympics also has real benefits, including the ability to leverage infrastructure already put in place for the larger, better-funded Winter Games.
Running the two games simultaneously could enhance some efficiencies while sending a meta-message of unity and equity, but as Scott and coauthors pointed out, “critics of a unified games voice concerns that Paralympic events might be overshadowed by Olympic events.” (The International Paralympic Committee could not be reached for comment.)
Keeping the games separated as they are now – but moving them both three weeks earlier so that the Winter Paralympics would take place closer to late February – “makes a huge difference” in terms of climate reliability, Scott said. On the downside, pushing the Winter Olympics start date into mid- or late January will nudge it closer to the already-crowded year-end holidays, which would raise its own set of concerns.
The 18°F cliff and why it’s so important
It’s intuitive that as you warm up winters in snow-friendly climates, there’ll eventually be less snow. But an especially frigid climate might shift toward increased snow at first, as gradually warmer but still-cold-enough-for-snow air masses make their way into winter storms. There’s also continuing research into the role of Arctic warming in affecting the timing and structure of mid-latitude winter storms. Such a process could be making certain systems more potent even within the broader trends toward less mid-latitude cold and snow overall.
Read: What caused the Gulf Coast’s incredible January snowstorm?
At Dartmouth College, geographers Justin Mankin and postdoctoral researcher Alexander Gottlieb have been carrying out what you might call winter-climate autopsies, examining how a location goes from being snow-reliable to snow-sketchy. In a 2024 Nature paper and a 2025 followup in Water Resources Research, Gottlieb and Mankin examined trends from 1981 to 2020 in temperature, precipitation, runoff, and March snowpack, using a coordinated blend of observations and computer-model analysis.
One of their key findings: The amount of water in March snowpack has declined by 10-20% per decade across much of the Northern Hemisphere, including the Southwest United States and large parts of Europe. A few areas bucked the hemispheric trends, including the northern U.S. Great Plains and parts of Siberia, where increases of 5-10% per decade were found.
Another important point emerged: Trouble starts to intensify once a location’s average winter temperature climbs above –8 degrees Celsius (–8°C), or around 18°F. As the full-day average starts moving above that threshold, the share of days when high temperatures nudge above freezing starts to climb much more dramatically. And those thawing-out days are the ones that have the biggest impact on midwinter snowpack.
Around –8°C, said Gottlieb in an email, “seems to be the point at which wintertime temperature variability can be large enough to allow a location to begin losing a meaningful number of days below freezing with warming.”
Midwinter thaws in particular are an underrecognized threat to many aspects of snow hydrology and storage.
“So it’s not a simple story of November and March getting warmer,” Mankin said in an interview. “The reliability of snow remaining on the ground even in the heart of January or February goes down.”
As it happens, most of the recent Winter Olympic host cities are already well above the -8°C climate threshold identified by Gottlieb and Mankin. So it’s no surprise that additional warming is having such an impact, even at the competition sites above these cities. The threshold also implies that significant midwinter snow loss could expand and intensify at an accelerated pace as warming proceeds.
“I think it’s increasingly likely that there’s going to be more last-minute scrambling to find viable venues when even those places that seem safer bets don’t pan out,” Gottlieb said. “I’d expect that the mismatch between the timescales on which events like the Winter Olympics are planned, and the rapidly increasing likelihood of low-snow years with warming, would create more of these situations where planned hosts just aren’t viable come time for the event.”
As Mankin puts it, “We can think of winter recreation areas as essentially being islands, and warming is starting to swallow those islands.”
Building on nature’s snow, and keeping athletes safe, without trashing the environment
Observers and organizers alike are looking for ways to cut the environmental impacts of the sprawling Winter Olympics, including their carbon footprints, while keeping enough traditional aspects to make them recognizable as the Winter Olympics and making sure athletes aren’t competing in dangerous conditions.
As part of a mandate adopted in 2020, both the Winter and Summer Olympics are required to be “climate positive” from 2030 onward. Along with offsetting indirect as well as direct carbon emissions, the organizing committees are now tasked with implementing zero-carbon solutions, such as green transport options, that can benefit host sites long after the Olympics are gone.
Snowmaking has been used at every Winter Olympics since New York in 1980. It’s an energy- and water-intensive practice, though its fuel demands are far outweighed by the emissions generated in grooming slopes and getting people to and from ski areas. Ironically, the growth of snowmaking has itself paved the way for venues such as subtropical Sochi that would have been risky picks when the Winter Games launched a century ago.
Given the bleak outlook for natural snow at nearly all venues by later this century, it’s highly unlikely that snowmaking will be ditched entirely. However, the efficiency of snowmaking is on the increase, and snowmaking’s power draw is part of the Winter Olympics energy picture now being scrutinized more closely than ever.
“Abandoning snowmaking would result in a major increase in unfair and unsafe conditions for athletes, cancelled competitions, and eventually a Winter Games without any snow sports,” Scott and colleagues wrote.
Comparing the next three Winter Olympics sites, snowmaking in 2030 will call on the French power grid, which is overwhelmingly based on nuclear and renewable energy. Producing the same amount of snow at this year’s Winter Olympics in northern Italy will lead to around six times more carbon dioxide being emitted than is projected for the 2030 games, according to Scott and colleagues. And if the current fuel mix at the Utah venue is still in place by the 2034 games, then producing the same amount of snow at that event would dump 16 times more CO2 into the air.
“No sport can escape the impacts of climate change,” said coauthor Orr, a skier herself who served as lead author of the 2022 United Nations Environment Programme report “Sports for Nature: Setting a Baseline.”
As Orr put it, “The winter sport community must work together to find solutions to adapt to climate change and achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.”
Orr added in an email:
We like to focus our attention on the Olympics because it’s flashy, and people have a general understanding of what we’re talking about. But I’m not worried about the Olympics. They’ve got enough investment and stakeholder engagement to keep going regardless of the costs of adaptation. I worry about the local ski hills that will struggle to stay open, and all the workers and families whose livelihoods depend on that tourism. I worry about the next generation who won’t learn to ski at all because the season is so short and unpredictable that parents don’t think it’s worth the cost of teaching them. The Games will go on. But everything behind it – community ski clubs, the talent development pipelines, the family traditions, the winter sports culture – might fall away. That’s what’s at risk here.
Jeff Masters contributed to this post.
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