The Snow Thieves
Global climate change is already affecting all sectors of society. This report looks at how carbon pollution is visibly ruining winter sports, tells the story of how the collapsing snow sports sector is being used as a billboard by some of the very major polluters whose emissions are speeding its downfall.
The study examines the toxic relationship between high carbon emitters, such as the car, oil and airline industries as sponsors, and the winter sports sector, as promoters of their own climate destruction through advertisements and sponsorships that normalise high carbon products, activities and lifestyles.
The report finds that:
Through their pollution, high-carbon sponsors of winter sports are melting the future of the very sports they sponsor.
With their clean, healthy outdoor image, winter sports are especially attractive to sponsorship from major polluters who want to ‘sportswash’ their image. We easily identified 107 high carbon sponsorship deals with skiing organisations, event organisers, teams and with individual athletes. We found car manufacturers, led by Audi to be the most active with a total of 83 sponsoring deals, of which Audi has 54. Fossil fuel companies and airlines come in next with 12 and 5 deals respectively.
The activities of high-carbon sponsors of winter sports are destroying the very conditions those sports need to survive. The emissions of just two sponsors of the ‘London Marathon of skiing’, Sweden’s famous Vasaloppet, the world’s biggest cross-country ski race, energy company Preem and Volvo Cars, combined are estimated to be responsible for the loss of 1,260 million tonnes of glacier ice each year, or 210 square kilometres (km2) of snow cover (see Appendix 2). Compared to the area needed for the Vasaloppet ski race itself, this amounts to melting the equivalent of 233 Vasaloppet ski races. At the beginning of the 2022/23 season alpine skiers saw seven races in a row cancelled in Central Europe.
In mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, winters are expected to shrink at a rate of 4.7 days per decade and may in a high emission scenario by the end of the century be as short as 31 days, from 18 December to 18 January, with winter lasting only a single month.
European Ski resorts have experienced temperatures above 20°C this winter and some have simply had to close. In our heating world, the extent of snow cover has declined significantly over the past 90 years, with most of the reductions occurring after 1980.
Over the period 1967–2015, the extent of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere decreased by 7 percent on average in March and April and by 47 percent in June. In Europe, the observed reductions are even larger, at 13 percent for March and April and 76 percent for June.
Compared to 1970, each year the snow cover in the northern hemisphere shrinks by an additional estimated 90,600 square kilometres on average, over one fifth the size of Sweden and over one third the size of Great Britain.
The increasing consequences of climate change are already having an economic effect on local snow sport businesses. For the European skiing tourism market, an average warming of 2°C is expected to generate a loss of 10.1 million guest nights per winter season and an even greater loss of ski lift ticket sales. Each year more and more snow sport events are being cancelled because of a lack of snow or other anomalous weather events.
The automobile sector is one of the main carbon polluters fuelling climate breakdown and simultaneously one of the largest spenders in sports sponsorship, including snow sports. In 2018, a very conservative estimate suggested that the global car industry spent USD $1.285 billion on sports related sponsorships and is likely to have increased significantly since. That would amount to 64 percent of their total sponsorship money going into sports at the time.
It has been estimated that the increased demand due to global car and airline advertising could have been responsible for between 202 million and 606 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year.
There is a moral, legal, and practical case to end high-carbon advertising and sponsorship and the report calls for organisers, teams, and athletes to reject sponsorships from major polluters in order to save the future of their sports. It also calls for decision-makers and regulators to follow the precedent of ending tobacco advertising and sponsorship to legally end the similar promotion of high carbon products and services.