Paris 2024 is set to be the greenest Games in history. The Games’ organising committee has pledged to halve the Olympics’ carbon emissions — from roughly 3.5 million tonnes each in Tokyo 2020, Rio 2016, and London 2012 to 1.75 tonnes this time around.
Olympics during climate crisis
All evidence points to the planet being in a climate emergency, driven by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHG). In this context, mega sporting events, with their massive carbon footprint, might appear to be profligacy humanity can ill-afford.
At the same time, such events can also act as opportunities to further the fight against climate change. “Mega-events like the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup require massive public investments. Therefore, they should be good stewards of the public interest,” Madeleine Orr, Assistant Professor of Sport Ecology, University of Toronto, and Founder-Industry Lead of The Sport Ecology Group, told The Indian Express.
“These events must do a better job of reducing their extraordinarily large carbon footprints, and find ways to accelerate sustainable transitions in the places they are hosted. This is not just important for the events’ reputations, but, in a world which is on fire, important to justify them taking place,” she said. In this context, Paris 2024 promises to be game-changing.
Paris 2024’s climate efforts
Paris 2024 will majorly be powered by renewable energy sources like geothermal and solar power. A number of climate-friendly moves are being implemented.
Eating: Paris 2024 is trying to promote plant-based, local and sustainable food. The Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that the meat and dairly industries account for 18% global GHG emissions. All food-related infrastructure developed for the Games will see reuse after the Olympics.
Transport: Most Olympic venues are easily accessible by public transport. Paris will run special services to ensure that tourists do not have trouble getting around. Moreover, Paris has developed 1,000 km of dedicated cycle lanes, with an additional 3,000 pay-as-you-go cycles available for rent during the Games.
Construction: Unlike London, which built eight new venues for the Olympics, and Tokyo, which constructed 11 new sites, 95% of events in the Paris Games will be held in existing buildings or temporary infrastructure. The competition venue that Paris is building, the Aquatics Centre in Saint-Denis, is solar-powered, and uses recycled, natural bio-based building material. Globally, the construction industry is among the highest GHG emitters, responsible for 37% of global emissions.
Living arrangements: While the high temperatures in Paris have forced organisers to install 2,500 temporary cooling units for athletes, instead of being AC-free as originally planned, the athletes’ living arrangements are nonetheless fairly sparse. Their mattresses are made from recycled fishing nets, and beds made from reinforced cardboard. Significant amount of the furniture being used during the Games is rented, rather than bought, and will see reuse after the Olympics. The 2,800 new apartments in the Olympic Village will be converted to homes after the event.
Not completely eco-friendly
The Olympics will host 15,000 athletes, 45,000 volunteers, and 26,000 media professionals. Paris expects to host more than 10 million tourists during the Games. This means a lot of air travel, and consequently, a lot of GHG emissions.
“It’s great to see the ambition [of Paris 2024] to be very low-impact, but to say that it will be ‘carbon positive’ is just not realistic in the context of an international sporting event with hundreds of thousands of tourists and participants,” Orr wrote in her book Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport, published this May this year.
The organisers have said that Paris 2024 has “developed a funding programme for projects aimed at avoiding and capturing carbon emissions, which will aim to offset unavoidable Games-related emissions”. Offsetting is a way for individuals or organisations to “compensate” for the environmental costs of their actions by funding projects which will plant trees, rejuvenate forests, etc.
Many experts however say that offsetting amounts to little more than “greenwashing”. “It gives you a guilt-free feeling, a feeling that you have done your part to be ‘carbon neutral’. In reality, many offsetting projects are not implemented, and even if they are, there is no monitoring to ensure that they continue to work as intended,” climate activist Harjeet Singh, global engagement director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said. “What we really need are real reductions, rather than offsetting,” he added.
Nonetheless, Paris 2024 will still go down as the most climate-friendly Olympics in history, and provide a blueprint for major sporting events in the future. As Orr put it, the developments for the Games, such as the use of rented and reused material wherever possible, and improvements in public transit infrastructure and cycle lanes, “will all offer long-term benefits to Parisians”.
Ahead of the Games, 1,000-plus km of cycling lanes have been built in Paris. (Reuters) 
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