A surprising way Vancouver's FIFA games are different from the 1994 World Cup
With Vancouver set to host the FIFA World Cup in less than a month, there is one notable difference from the last time they were hosted in North America.
The World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international scientific collaboration, recently published a report where it analyzed how much hotter the 2026 games might be than the last time they were hosted in North America — which was in 1994 in the U.S.
“We were just curious to understand what’s going to happen during the World Cup, because it’s a big event,” said Joyce Kimutai, a research associate in extreme weather and climate change at Imperial College, and co-author of the report.
“Normally … we would compare conditions in the climate now versus pre-industrial — or what we would call the climate when there was very little or no influence of humans in the climate system,” she told Daily Hive. “But for this one, we thought it might be interesting to compare the conditions when the U.S. last hosted a World Cup tournament, and now just to see what might have changed.”
She said that people might recall the ’94 World Cup, but might not be thinking about how much climate change has heated up the planet in the time since.
The WWA researchers assessed each game day in North America with a heat index called the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT), which includes both temperature and humidity.
Physiologists use WBGT as a measure of how effectively a body can cool itself, with a 26°C WBGT considered risky, and a 28°C WBGT or above considered unsafe for players to play, according to the global players’ union.
While Vancouver games have “relatively safer conditions” compared to other stadiums (like in Miami, Kansas City, New York, and Philadelphia), the likelihood of the extreme values of 28°C WBGT has still doubled since 1994 due to climate change.
Further, out of all the cities with World Cup matches, Vancouver and Seattle have seen the largest increase in event intensity ranges since 1994.
Vancouver’s climate in 2026 is roughly 0.7 degrees C warmer than it was in 1994.
“Climate change is certainly driving an increase in the chance of hot and sticky conditions,” said Theodore Keeping, a researcher in extreme weather at Imperial College London, in a statement sent to Daily Hive.
In any given year, it might be an above-average temperature summer or a below-average temperature summer, said Kristina Dahl, Climate Central’s vice president for science, with whom Daily Hive recently spoke about Vancouver’s hotter summers.
But climate change is “loading the dice” for more and more warmer-than-average summers.
“It’s just more and more likely that you can experience a summer that’s hotter than the ones that you grew up with, and especially the ones that your parents or grandparents grew up with,” she said.
Burning fossil fuels releases “heat-trapping gases” like carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere.
“And then those gases add to the layer around Earth’s atmosphere that holds in heat, sort of like a blanket. So, it’s like we’re thickening the blanket and trapping more heat in our atmosphere. And that’s what’s causing temperatures to warm up,” Dahl explained.