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In the year the world first surpassed the 1.5°C dangerous global warming threshold set out in the Paris Climate Agreement, the international community celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Olympic Winter Games and considers its future in a warmer world. In the largest study to date, the climate reliability of 93 locations to host Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (OWG and PWG) snow sports is examined. Under a more probable mid-range emission scenario (RCP4.5, SSP2-45), 52 locations remain climate-reliable for the OWG in the 2050s and 46 in the 2080s. The scheduling of the PWG in March put it at higher risk, with only 22 climate-reliable locations in the 2050s and 16 in the 2080s. When a more stringent minimum snow depth requirement was applied, the number of reliable locations declined slightly for both OWG and PWG, signifying the importance of advanced sustainable snowmaking as an adaptation strategy. While it is inevitable that climate change will impact the geography and development of winter sports to some degree, a reassuring finding is that even with a diminished pool of potential host locations, with continued adaptation, the OWG-PWG can endure as a genuinely global celebration of sport.
Steiger et al. (Fri,) studied this question.