Ruth Sherlock

But there was one thing conspicuously missing, which is...

snow.

The mountain peaks were bare, there was just yellow grass, and the only snow you could see really was on the pistes, and that was artificial snow.

The snowfall is getting less and less with climate change, with these shorter winters, and environmentalists say it's going to take huge amounts of energy and water to have this much artificial snow.

In fact, official documents show

they were estimating that for these Olympics, they may need as much as 380 Olympic swimming pools worth.

Well, this is the thing.

They're having to take it from alpine springs and rivers in the area.

An environmental activist took me to see one of the sites that they're drawing the water from, and it

was this once pristine landscape just kind of turned into a building site.

There was bits of broken pipes and huge mounds of earth and trees cut down.

And they are taking gallons and gallons per second.

And the problem is, you know, what is the impact on local biodiversity, on the local ecology?

These rivers are already stressed by climate change and human use.

And the thing is, we don't know because the in-depth environmental assessment hasn't been done.

In fact, that's the case for about 60 percent of the some 98 infrastructure projects that have been approved for these games.

Cortina is this traditionally tiny town, this jewel in the beautiful Dolomites, this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

When I was there, I counted about 20 cranes for different construction projects, so it will have an impact.

Organisers had tried to say, you know, that they were going to try to use existing sporting equipment, existing arenas, existing sporting spaces so that they don't have to rebuild them.

And that is the case.