This year’s Sapporo Snow Festival will be the 75th edition of the annual event in Japan’s Northern Capital, a cause for celebration, but it’s also a time for looking at future challenges.
The festival, which opened Tuesday and runs through next Tuesday, is one of the world’s largest snow sculpture events, featuring over 200 snow sculptures, some as tall as 12 meters. The event draws as many as two million visitors a year.
Despite that kind of success, there are clouds on the horizon. For a start, global climate change has resulted in increasingly irregular snowfall patterns, making it harder to guarantee enough snow, and warmer temperatures mean melting sculptures. And, there’s a growing shortage of snow sculpture production workers.
There are also financial issues, according to Sapporo’s tourism authorities: there have been rising costs for production at the same time as a decrease in advertising revenue. Tomonori Aoyama, Director General for Sapporo City Tourism told press that “To address the unprecedented challenges, we need to find imaginative solutions with the help of domestic and international co-operation.”
