Due to global warming, 8 of the 20 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics from 1924 to the present day will no longer be able to do so.
From Norway to France, from Austria to Russia. Organising the Winter Olympic Games will become increasingly difficult in the coming decades. Due to the impact of climate change on ski resorts, fewer and fewer cities will be capable of hosting the sporting competitions. Proof of this lies in the fact that eight of the twenty locations that have hosted the Winter Olympics to date will no longer be able to do so from 2050 onwards.
Rising global temperatures, the resulting decline in snowfall and the retreat of glaciers will make it impossible to guarantee the staging of competitions in Oslo (Norway, which hosted the event in 1952), Chamonix (France, 1924), Innsbruck (Austria, 1964 and 1976), Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1984), Grenoble (France, 1968), Squaw Valley (United States, 1960), Sochi (Russia, 2014) and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany, 1936).
The findings come from a study conducted by Canadian researcher Daniel Scott. According to the French daily Novethic, the scholar examined the impact of climate change on each of the cities, concluding that for the eight former winter sports capitals, the Olympic Games will become a distant memory within three decades. Furthermore, PyeongChang, which is currently hosting the five rings in South Korea, and Beijing, which will do so in 2022, are considered "at risk".
The scientist stated that, as a consequence, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will receive an ever-dwindling number of bids in the future. The Canadian study is, moreover, consistent with expert forecasts, according to which by the end of the century it will no longer be possible to see snowfall below 1,800 metres altitude.
The Alps in particular are proving especially vulnerable to the phenomenon of global warming. In 2015, journalist Helene Fouquet, of the Bloomberg agency, visited the Mont Blanc glacier in France, twenty-seven years after her first visit in 1988, when she was still a child. She recounted how, whereas thirty years ago one needed only to descend three steps to set foot on the Mer de Glace ("La Mer de Glace"), today one must instead climb no fewer than 370.
Another study presented in the same year in the French city of Grenoble, authored by a group of Cnrs experts led by glaciologist Jérôme Chappellaz, concluded that "within a decade, two at most, all ski slopes below 1,800 metres are doomed. Snow will fall from time to time, but there is now nothing left to do but think about their conversion to other uses." This will make it impossible to practise winter sports at around one hundred Alpine ski resorts.
