PARIS: This year’s Paris Olympics will use renewable energy, serve plenty of vegetarian food and drastically cut back on plastic bottles, but can an event involving so much construction and international travel ever be environmentally sustainable?
After the extravagant 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, which included air-conditioned stadiums, the Paris Games hope to present a more sober model for global sporting events.
“I hope that Paris 2024’s efforts to reduce its impacts can show that it is possible to do things differently,” Georgina Grenon, the organizing committee’s director of environmental excellence, told AFP in a recent interview.
One of the main differences will be in overall carbon emissions, with organizers aiming to halve the amount generated by the 2012 Olympics in London and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Paris 2024 originally set a target of 1.58 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, but this ambition has been reduced to around 1.75 million tonnes.
“Something we’re not today is the (carbon impact) of the audience,” Grenon said when asked if the latest goal could be met.
One key factor will be the number of heavily polluting air journeys associated with the games, and “we haven’t sold all the tickets yet,” she added.
An external consultancy will be tasked with examining the impact of travel, construction, catering and sports facilities, with final figures to be released in October.
The key to reducing Paris’ carbon footprint was contained in the city’s original bid. Organizers have promised to use either existing or temporary venues for 95 percent of sporting events, meaning they could avoid building new stadiums from scratch.
The only major newly built projects were an aquatic center, a medium-sized venue in Paris for badminton and gymnastics, and a sports village in the neglected Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis.
Contractors for the village had to agree to reduce emissions from their buildings by 30 percent compared to standard construction, meaning many experimented with low-carbon concrete and wood.
Other changes include connecting all sports grounds to the electricity grid, meaning stadium operators do not rely on diesel generators.
“To give you an idea of the volume of diesel for the London Games, four million liters were burned there just for electricity,” Grenon said.
Elsewhere, Coca-Cola – the main sponsor of the Olympics – has agreed to install 700 newly designed drinking fountains at Olympic sports venues, meaning around 50 per cent of soft drinks will be served without a plastic bottle.
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Elsewhere, the catering at the sports grounds will be 60 percent vegetarian. Recycling and reuse clauses were commonly written into contracts with equipment suppliers. All energy supplied to the games by national energy group EDF will be from renewable sources.
Where Games organizers still face an uphill battle to convince observers is their policy of offsetting their emissions – something known as “carbon offsets”.
Even if they met their emissions target of 1.75 million tonnes, it would be equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of a French city of 200,000.
They initially claimed that Paris 2024 would be “carbon positive”, meaning that the organizing committee would invest in projects such as planting trees that would capture more carbon dioxide during their lifetime than the games would emit.
That target has also been revised downwards – the Games now aim to be “carbon neutral” – and a tender for an offset project in France was canceled late last year for budgetary reasons, says Grenon.
Compensation remains controversial due to doubts about the environmental benefits of many systems, as well as a lack of independent oversight. Some critics see its main role in providing a clear conscience for polluters.
“There’s been a lot of criticism about some of the certification methodologies, because some countries are more serious than others, so that’s why we chose projects that were particularly serious from the start,” Grenon counters.
The forestry project in France has state certification – “label bas carbone” – and the international ones have been “researched to death” and will be “revealed to the media soon”, promised Grenon.
The Olympics have faced protests from environmental groups since the 1980s. Some are outright against it, arguing that any social benefits are outweighed by the environmental costs, while others believe the concept simply needs to be rethought.
One group of researchers suggested in the journal Nature Sustainability in 2021 that the event should be scaled down, held in the same locations and with far fewer international travelers.
“There is something unique around sports and the Olympics, an emotion, a message of peace,” argued Grenon.
“The future starts with the present, and the present starts with understanding your impact and trying to do as much as possible to reduce it,” she said. “That’s been our credo from the very beginning.”
