A Ban on Polluter Sponsorships In Winter Sports Can Save Our Snow

canopic jug writes:

The New Weather Institute in the UK and Sweden, as part of the Save Our Snow campaign (warning for javascript), has a joint campaign to end fossil sponsorships in sports. The reasoning is that those companies are responsible for the worsening climate disaster resulting in the decreasingly short winters with reduced snowfall and thus harming the very sports which they are sponsoring. Along those lines, the institute has published a report, Dirty Snow: The Snow Thieves 2 report: how a ban on polluter sponsorships in winter sport can help save our snow (warning for PDF).

Key findings:

Climate change is an immediate threat to winter sports. On current trends, in mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere winters are expected to continue to shrink by 4.7 days per decade. In a high emission scenario, by the end of the century, that means winter could be as short as 31 days, a single month.^1

But, winter sports are currently being sponsored by the very companies whose pollution heats the atmosphere, melting the snow and ice they depend on.

Using a calculation for the known relationship between emissions and snow cover loss, the existing CO₂ emissions of seven polluting winter sports sponsors (Audi, Ford, SAS, Equinor, Aker, Volvo, Preem), presented here as case studies, will melt an area 1,968 square kilometres (km²) of spring snow every year. That is equal to a land surface area 437 times bigger than the ground area used for skiing of Are, Sweden's largest ski resort and a potential bidder for the 2030 Winter Olympics; and 195 times bigger than the skiing area of Skicircus Saalbach, one of the world's largest skiing areas host of the FIS Alpine World Cup Finals 2024.

But now, this report provides, for the first time, a new, clear formula to calculate the additional CO₂ emissions that will result from any given sponsorship deal.

We show that, depending on the sponsoring company's carbon footprint, a sponsorship deal can generate up to 100 kg of CO₂e per sponsored euro.^2

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