How Sustainable Were The 2026 Olympics, Really?

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is proud of the sustainability actions it required the host country, Italy, to implement for the 2026 Milano Cortina Games. Measures included minimizing negative impacts on the environment and using the Games’ visibility to showcase sustainable solutions. Protecting biodiversity and managing resources sustainably, the Committee says, provided an opportunity for the Olympics to raise awareness of climate action and low-carbon technologies.

Organizers pledged that the Games would “showcase the importance of protecting sensitive mountain ecosystems.” Christophe Dubi, executive director of the Olympic Games, added, “For the IOC, for sport in general, sustainability is a priority,” part of a movement “bringing new perspectives to the Games.”

Several minimal standards were set in place for the host country. There was no minimum spectator capacity requirement for venues to ensure efficient legacy built structure use. Transport and general infrastructure improvements had to be part of long-term socio-economic development plans to improve the region for its population. Hosting would organically enhance the acceleration of local, regional, and national sustainability strategies, the IOC noted.

While these proclamations sound good on the surface, the disconnect between IOC promises and on-the-ground actual practice was quite distinct.

Promises Unkept at the 2026 Olympics

Tremors of environmental unrest began two years before the Games, when twenty Italian and international associations, including Mountain Wilderness, Libera, World Wildlife Fund, Legambiente, and Club Alpino Italiano, requested transparency from the IOC and the Milano-Cortina 2026 Foundation in advance of the Games.

A planned roundtable of the sustainability-forward associations and the IOC was abandoned a year before the start of the Olympic Games. A joint association statement indicated they found “no evidence to certify the environmental sustainability” of the projects for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

“The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games were presented as ‘the Olympics of sustainability’,” World Wildlife Fund Italia explained, “but this is not the case.”

WWF Italia was one of the organizations that walked away from the Games. “Sustainability is the great lie of these Games,” argued Andy Bull in The Guardian.

Examples of Environmental Issues at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games

Traditionally, Olympics are situated in host city centers and their outskirts, which limits the need for cross-site transit. However, the 2026 Milano–Cortina Winter Games were held across various geographic locations, an anomaly among Games to date. That distribution of events put pressure on the host country to move forward toward material circularity, which, in lay terms, means assessing the share of material that is recycled and fed back into the economy.

As Olympic budgets have grown at a time of increasing global warming, environmental pleas find both receptive audiences and difficult policy barriers. Indeed, the amount of greenhouse gases estimated released into the atmosphere as a result of the 2026 Games was comparable to emissions from 4 million average-sized, gasoline-fueled cars driving from Paris to Rome, as revealed by the organizing committee in its greenhouse gas management strategy.

Large-scale construction has often required reshaping natural landscapes for past Winter Games. That was also the case in several instances at the 2026 Olympics; sustainability was secondary in many cases to the need to foreground Olympic grandeur for global audiences.

• The Italian government waived the need for any Environmental Impact Assessment work to be done on 60% of construction projects.
• The Olympics were staged in the midst of a Unesco World Heritage Site — one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet.
• A forest was chopped down as part of construction of a bobsled track. It required the felling of approximately two hectares of forest and 600 larches, which had been in place for approximately two centuries.
• Snowmaking required reservoirs, pipelines, pumping stations, and electricity grids robust enough to sustain prolonged production. In fragile alpine ecosystems, diverting water, especially during dry winters, can alter stream flows and local hydrology. Four high altitude reservoirs were built, and water used to fill them had to be pumped up the mountains after being extracted from already drought-affected local rivers.
• Games needed 84.8 million cubic feet of water, or the equivalent of 380 Olympic swimming pools, for snowmaking alone. This water was drawn from Alpine rivers and streams.
• Of 98 construction projects, 13% was applied to the staging of the Games, and 87% to infrastructure works like roads, rails, or car parks to be built post-Olympics.
• In superficial gestures of sustainability, the IOC installed three new lifts and added about 80 accessible seats on every level of the curling venue to increase accessibility. Minor gestures like improved roof insulation increased energy efficiency, and a new dehumidification system enhanced the internal environment and the ice quality, while lowering overall energy consumption.
• No new infrastructure or venues were required, the Committee had stated beforehand. But, given the lack of a strong tradition of hockey and the absence of a suitable hockey stadium, the Olympic Committee and the Municipality of Milan decided to construct a new sports facility, which had a larger footprint than previous structures there. Alessandro Ferrari wrote in the Online Newspaper of Environmental Communication that the stadium, built with public funds, was designed to serve the interests of private entities. “There is a risk that works built for the Olympic Games will be abandoned after the event,” he continued, “or given to private companies to manage, which would be detrimental to citizens and and the ethics of sport.”

Luigi Casanova, a former forest ranger who is now a writer and activist, explained that advocates in the Italian environmental movement had offered numerous alternative solutions that would have been “less environmentally impactful, less costly, safe, and socially beneficial to communities.” Casanova, who has written two vital books on the environmental impact of the Olympics, muttered that Cortina, commonly referred to as Queen of the Dolomite, should be renamed the “Queen of Cement.”

“We have other Olympic sacrileges to list: the Socrepes cable car in Cortina, built on a moving landslide, the Olympic village in Cortina, 15 hectares [37 acres] of natural land destroyed for a village that will be dismantled, the village of Predazzo built at the confluence of two alluvial streams; the slopes of Bormio and Livigno, upgraded with the destruction of thousands of trees.”

Final Thoughts

This is part one of a two-part series. The next edition will dig into the façade of pervasive clean energy at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games — as well as the all-too-common pattern that has emerged in major sports for Big Oil to offer major sponsorships while contributing the majority of climate damage.

(Research resources used for this article will be included in part two.)