No sport can escape the impacts of a changing climate. Less snow and ice, higher temperatures, and extreme weather events such as storms and heatwaves, all affect competitors and spectators alike.
“Climate change is one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced, affecting sport alongside so many other human activities,” says Marie Sallois, IOC Director for Corporate and Sustainable Development.
“Sporting events must constantly adapt to the impacts of climate disruption, and the Olympic Games are no exception. As a global event with a huge visibility, the Games also carry the responsibility to take effective action to address it.”
Committed to a more sustainable future, the Olympic Movement has already taken significant steps to reduce its own footprint and contribute to a climate-friendly society. Both Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 are aiming to be carbon neutral.
Wildfire smoke from Canada and the Western United States stretched across the continent this week, covering skies in a thick haze and triggering health alerts from Toronto to Philadelphia. Air quality remained in the unhealthy range across much of the East Coast on Wednesday morning as the haze pushed southward.
In the years after World War II, car ownership boomed in the United States, and so did the development of urban freeways. In many cases, making it easy for people to drive from suburban areas to downtown business districts came at a severe cost to low income neighborhoods, and especially to places with high concentrations of Black and brown residents.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week issued its latest “climate normals”: baseline data of temperature, rain, snow and other weather variables collected over three decades at thousands of locations across the country.
