Shortly before the Winter Olympics kicked off, Cortina d’Ampezzo—the Dolomite town hosting several alpine events for the Games—got a fresh dusting of snow, easing [blank] about snow reliability after a warm start to the winter. Still, organizers have already produced over [blank] of artificial snow to meet athletes’ expected conditions.
This isn’t a new approach. Ski resorts have used machine-made snow for decades to handle unpredictable weather, for both recreation and competitions. Roughly [blank] of global ski resorts now rely on snowmaking machines alongside natural snowfall, and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics used nearly 100% artificial snow.
As climate change warms winters, this practice may grow more common—but it often carries a climate cost.
Like natural snow, artificial snow is a mix of snow and ice, but its creation differs sharply from atmospheric snowflakes.
“Machine-made snow involves freezing liquid water into rounded ice beads; when these beads accumulate on the ground, they look like natural snow,” says Noah Molotch, a snow hydrology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Snowmaking machines spray a blend of compressed air and water—a process that uses significant energy and water. A 2023 [blank] found that in Canada, producing 1.4 billion cubic feet of snow in an average winter requires an estimated 478,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity yearly, leading to 130,095 metric tons of associated carbon emissions—equivalent to the annual energy use of nearly 17,000 Canadian households—and about 1.5 billion cubic feet of water, roughly 17,320 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
It’s estimated the Games will need 84.8 million cubic feet of water—equal to 380 Olympic swimming pools—for snowmaking alone, per [blank]. The water source matters, notes Daniel Scott, a geography and environmental management professor at the University of Waterloo. “In many North American areas (and Cortina has these too), we have purpose-built mountain reservoirs where we capture spring runoff when water is plentiful, turn it into snow on the slopes, and 80-90% of that melts back into the same watershed the next year.”
The same logic applies to energy. “If you use electricity from a grid heavy on fossil fuels, you’re contributing to climate change—the very reason you need snowmaking in the first place. So the electricity source is critical,” Scott says.
Scott adds that the simple fix for the practice’s energy drain is ensuring electricity comes from renewable sources—a switch many snow towns from Quebec to the French Alps have already made. The International Olympic Committee states that [blank] of the energy used for snowmaking this year will be renewably sourced.
Scott notes that in some cases, snowmaking can disrupt a region’s ecological balance, causing delayed blooms for example, though impacts are often minor. “Adding to the natural snowpack makes it melt slower,” he says. “This causes compaction and affects vegetation and soil in ski areas.”
But Scott says artificial snow can help cut overall emissions by letting people ski closer to home.
“If you took snowmaking away from New England, there’d be no ski industry in the Northeast. People wanting to ski from Boston or New York would fly to Colorado or Utah, or drive to Quebec—each option has a far larger carbon footprint,” he says.
Yet no matter how sustainably artificial snow is made, it can’t solve the problems many snowy locales face as temperatures rise. A [blank] study found that out of 93 potential host sites, only 52 would have reliable Winter Olympics conditions in the 2050s. Cortina d’Ampezzo now has 41 fewer freezing days annually than when it first hosted the Games in 1956. To make machine-made snow, air temperatures need to be near freezing.
Molotch says this is why snowmaking won’t fix the issues the Olympics and broader winter sports industry will face in a warming world. “Artificial snow isn’t the silver bullet for addressing climate change-related problems in the ski industry.”