Climate change
Will prevent cities like Sochi and Vancouver from hosting future Winter Games.
The planet is warming so quickly that a new report predicts Winter Olympic cities like Vancouver and Sochi will be out of luck in the future.
It says only six of the previous 19 Winter Olympic sites will be cold enough to reliably host the Games by the end of the century. Even under conservative climate change projections, it says Olympic sites, such as Vancouver, Sochi, Chamonix in France and GarmischPartenkirchen in Germany will be too warm by 2050.
“Fewer and fewer traditional winter sports regions will be able to host an Olympic Winter Games in a warmer world,” lead author Daniel Scott, an expert on global tourism at the University of Waterloo, says in a release issued with the report to be published Thursday.
“The implications for winter sports are unmistakable,” says the report by the researchers at Waterloo and Austria’s Management Center Innsbruck.
Olympics organizers already spend a fortune helping Mother Nature with “weather risk management strategies” to ensure athletes have snow and ice to ski, skate and slide on. In the past 30 years, refrigerated tracks and jumps and snow and ice machines have become common fixtures at Olympic venues.
At the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 a small fortune was spent storing and moving snow, and snow machines have been working overtime in Sochi in the run-up to next month’s Games.
But the report says there are limits. “By the middle of this century, these limits will be surpassed in some former Winter Olympic host regions,” says Scott, whose team charted how temperatures have climbed since the first winter games in 1924 and will continue to climb in the coming century.
The researchers say the average February daytime temperature at Games locations has increased from 0.4 C in the 1920-50s, to 3.1 C in the 1960 to 1990s, to 7.8 C this century.
As for the future, the report projects February temperatures will increase at the 19 former Olympic Winter Games locations by as much as 2.1 C by 2050 and by 4.4 C by late in the century.
In the later half of this century “renowned Olympic sites, such as Squaw Valley (U.S.), GarmischPartenkirchen (Germany), as well as recent host cities of Vancouver (Canada) and Sochi (Russia), simply would not be cold enough to reliably host the Games,” the report says.
It notes the Olympic charter includes a binding commitment to sustainable development, and in the past 15 years steps have been taken to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions generated by the Games.
Organizers in Sochi are aiming for “carbon neutral Games” by investing in energy conservation, renewable energy sources and carbon offsets.
The report urges today’s youth to push for concerted international action to ensure former Olympic cities will still be in the game in 100 years.
What’s needed, the report says, is an “ambitious global agreement that will ensure the rapid transition to a low carbon economy and limit warming of global average temperatures to less than +2 C over pre-industrial times.”