One-hundred percent of the snow that athletes at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics are competing on is artificial—pumped out by high-powered snow machines, rather than produced by Mother Nature.

The lack of natural snow is a first for the Winter Games—though it’s hardly an anomaly. Artificial snow was first used at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, but it has been growing in prevalence in the most recent Games. About 80% of the snow used in Sochi, Russia in 2014 was artificial, and that number went as high as 98% for the Pyeongchang Games in South Korea in 2018.

But the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s decision to select a city that must rely on artificial snow, raises questions about how sustainable the Winter Olympics are. Beijing has little to no natural snowfall in the winter, and yet it will stage 109 winter sporting events. To transform terrains, organizers will use almost 300 fan-powered snow guns and 83 lance-style snow guns from Italian firm TechnoAlpin.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed a more “green, inclusive, open and corruption-free” Winter Olympics. Organizers say all venues use renewable energy—primarily solar and wind—to minimize their carbon footprint, with some using a natural carbon dioxide refrigeration system to keep ice rinks frozen. Beijing has also planted tens of thousands of trees in an attempt to offset some of the emissions from the Games.

However, hosting an athletic contest based on snow and ice in a city where the average temperature does not drop below freezing, and which faces chronic water scarcity, is at odds with that goal, critics say. “To rely 100% on artificial snow does signal that the Olympics have landed in a place that is not climatically suitable,” says Madeleine Orr, a sports ecologist at the University of Loughborough in the U.K.

Beijing 2022 may offer a glimpse into the difficult future of the Winter Olympics. New research from the University of Waterloo in Canada shows that the list of cities that could sustainably hold the Winter Olympics is shrinking. If global greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, only one of the 21 previous locales for the Winter Games—Sapporo, Japan—would have the requisite temperature and precipitation to stage the games by 2080.

https://time.com/6146039/artificial-snow-2022-olympics-beijing/

According to Chinese President Xi Jinping, 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics