The Beijing Winter Olympics will be the first to use only artificial snow

It is no secret that during the Winter Olympics, artificial snow was often used to make up for the little that fell naturally from the clouds, but the next Olympic Games to be held in Beijing from February 4th will be the first to use only man-made snow. The Olympic Games will be the realization of the Chinese project to transform the region of Zhangjiakou in the Asian Alps, in an attempt to create an attractive area for winter tourism where now there is a poor rural area. To do this will be according to Bloomberg's forecasts, up to 2 million cubic meters of water will be used to create the snow needed to hold the Olympic competitions, and in one of the regions of China that suffers most from a lack of water resources. 

Zhangjiakou, 160 kilometers from Beijing, is in fact a cold but very dry region, where in the last forty years the average rainfall has been 7.9 millimeters per winter, a tenth of what falls in the Swiss Alps in December alone. Experts fear that such an invasive intervention, which would use 10% of the water usually consumed in Chongli, a district of Zhangjiakou, could have catastrophic effects both on the ecosystem of the region itself and in the long term on the global climate balance. A 2015 IOC (International Olympic Committee) report emphasized how Beijing had "underestimated the amount of water that would be needed for snowmaking for the Games" and at the same time "overestimated the ability to recapture water used for snowmaking".

Artificial snow, initially invented for use in Hollywood productions in the 1930s, has become increasingly essential for holding the Winter Olympics, an effect of the ongoing global warming that our planet is undergoing. In 1964 for the Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, soldiers had to transport over 40,000 cubic meters of snow and ice to safeguard the competitions. In Lake Placid, in the state of New York, in 1980 snow cannons were used intensively for the first time and they became more and more present as the editions passed. 80% of the snow used in 2014 for the Sochi Olympics was artificial, 90% four years later in PyeongChang, South Korea. 

Now with the first Games held entirely on artificial snow we have reached the paradox that in the coming years, due to global warming, human intervention will be increasingly needed to create the conditions necessary for the holding of events, the same that by changing the climate balance has created the problem in the first place.