Climate Change Threatens Future Winter Olympics Venues

Memorable host cities for the Winter Olympics wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of reliably hosting a Games in the next few decades amid climate change, according to a new report.

At the rate the Earth continues to heat up, only six of the last 19 Winter Olympics locations would be cold enough by the end of this century to stage the Games, the joint Canadian-Austrian study says.

Sochi, which hosts next month's Games in Russia, would not have made the cut by around 2050.               

“We went from all 19 cities being ‘climate reliable’ today, even Vancouver and Sochi, to going down to 11 of them,” said Waterloo Prof. Daniel Scott, lead author of the study and Canada Research Chair in Change and Global Tourism.  “The number was almost cut in half by mid-century.”

Climate Change Threatens Future Winter Olympics Venues