Snowmakers feel the heat as climate change tests Milano Cortina Winter Games

PARIS, Jan 27 : Snowmaking teams are racing to create competition conditions for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics within ever-narrower cold windows, as climate change steadily reshapes the limits of what technology can deliver.

Across Italy’s Alpine venues, organisers are relying increasingly on artificially produced snow to offset declining and less predictable natural snowfall, squeezing months of preparation into brief periods of sub-zero temperatures and leaving ever less room for error.

For Milano Cortina, established resorts such as Livigno, Bormio, Cortina d’Ampezzo and Antholz-Anterselva have expanded infrastructure already in place for elite competition, adding reservoirs, pump stations and snow guns to meet Olympic requirements.

In Livigno alone, more than 600,000 cubic metres of snow have been produced since mid-December for freestyle and snowboard events, with production accelerated during short cold spells, said Nemanja Dogo, executive technical manager at snowmaking specialist TechnoAlpin, which has supplied systems to several Olympic and World Cup venues.

"After Christmas we had temperatures down to minus 22 degrees, which was a very good period to make snow," Dogo explained.

Snowmaking typically depends on wet-bulb temperatures of around minus 2 to minus 2.5 degrees Celsius — conditions that allow snow to form efficiently. 

"The windows to get ready for the first of December are getting shorter and shorter," Dogo said.

Climate researchers say this loss of time is one of the clearest operational impacts of warming winters.

"It’s not just like the fact that you’re losing natural snow, you’re also losing the days that you need to make snow," said Caitlin Hicks Pries, an associate professor of biological