Latest research out of Canada is pitching ideas for the best way to make the Winter Olympics and Paralympics more resilient to climate change.
It builds on recent research co-authored by the University of Waterloo’s Daniel Scott that suggested only 16 of a possible 93 locations can reliably host the Paralympics in March by 2080 if global warming continues on its current trajectory.
The Olympics fare higher with about half of those locations maintaining enough snow depth and cold temperatures to reliably host in February.
The brand new research published today says unifying the Games in February is one strategy, however the mega event would raise more logistical issues and possibly cut out smaller cities.
One other idea Scott and his co-authors say is promising could be shifting each Games earlier by two to a few weeks.
The study suggests that just about doubles the variety of reliable Paralympic locations by 2080 with only a small cut to the list of potential Olympic hosts.
The research also suggests snowmaking, despite its water and energy demands, will probably be critical to the long run of the Games.
Without it, the study suggests only seven places could reliably host the events without delay, right down to 4 or fewer by mid-century.
The study says those that oppose snowmaking on the Winter Games would “condemn” the events to increasingly unfair and unsafe conditions for athletes, until snow sports are excluded entirely.
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Snowmaking has been used at each Winter Games since Lake Placid in 1980, but Beijing was the primary to depend on it almost entirely in 2022.
At next month’s Milan Cortina Games, organizers plan to make about 2.4 million cubic metres of snow. When Cortina hosted in 1956, no manufactured snow was used, though some was trucked in by the Italian army from the Dolomites.
FILE– A view of the Snowboarding and Freestyle Skiing events which can happen through the upcoming Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025.
(AP Photo/Gabriele Facciotti)
Finding ways to make snowmaking more sustainable have to be a priority for the Games, the study said.
In an announcement, co-author Madeleine Orr said “no sport can escape the impacts of climate change.”
“The world’s best athletes, who’ve dedicated their lives to sport, deserve nothing lower than the most effective conditions that will be provided sustainably. The winter sport community must work together to seek out solutions to adapt to climate change and achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement,” said Orr, a sport ecology professor on the University of Toronto.
The study was published within the peer-reviewed journal Current Issues in Tourism and co-authored with Robert Steiger at Austria’s University of Innsbruck.
Previous research co-authored by Steiger and Scott showed that of the 21 hosts to this point, almost half wouldn’t be “climatically reliable” by mid-century. A location was unreliable if it didn’t have sufficient snow depth or cold temperatures in 75 per cent of its winters.
That research got the eye of the International Olympic Committee. Scott says shortly after they presented their findings, the IOC paused the bidding race for the 2030 Games and cited the necessity to further study the results of climate change.
Scott and Steiger were commissioned by the IOC to expand their original evaluation to 93 locations, including mountain ranges with ski runs approved for international competition. The very best-elevation ski resorts in each of those ranges were assessed within the 2024 study.
The Games now require snow competition venues to be climate-reliable until at the very least mid-century.
© 2026 The Canadian Press