Well over 200 FIS athletes, including Mikaela Shiffrin, have signed and published an open letter to the International Ski Federation (FIS), requesting that the organization take further steps towards emissions reduction. The letter, written by Austrian athlete Julian Schütter and titled Our Sport Is Endangered, points out how climate change has damaged professional skiing and makes specific action requests for the FIS. It has been published to the Protect Our Winters website.
“As FIS athletes we are already experiencing the effects of climate change in our everyday lives and our profession. More and more often competitions have to be canceled due to extreme weather events or lack of snow. Pre-season training slopes are getting rarer and shorter every year, because glaciers are shrinking at a frightening pace. A heatwave in January brings the next lack of snow to Europe.”
The athletes’ demands include the creation of a strategy to reach 50% emissions reductions by 2030, the creation of a sustainability department within the FIS, a commitment to reaching net-zero for all operations within the FIS by 2035, and full transparency within the organization.
A list of recommended actions, along with several sources, is attached to the bottom of the letter. A change in the race season’s start and end and a geography based race schedule (strategically placing races to reduce travel emissions) begin the recommendations. Specifically, Aspen and Beaver Creek’s FIS events were listed as unnecessary travel.
The concluding recommendation points out the problems with the FIS’s commitment to carbon offsetting, a plan in which actions are taken to “neutralize” carbon emissions creating by the organization by removing emissions in another setting (in the FIS’s case, rainforest restoration). The letter states that keeping fossil fuels in the ground should be the priority, and that offsetting should only apply to the unavoidable emissions.
“The problem with carbon offsetting projects like rainforest conservation is that by burning fossil fuels carbon stored for millions of years is extracted and put into the fast carbon cycle, where it cannot be stored over such a long time.”
Athletes who have signed come from all over the world and are involved in nearly every FIS controlled discipline, including alpine skiing, freeride skiing and snowboarding, freestyle skiing and snowboarding, nordic skiing, ski jumping, and more.
Image Credit: Julian Schütter via Instagram