The Summer Olympics will soon begin in Paris against the backdrop of heat waves and drought throughout much of Southern Europe.
The organizers of the games say that in light of climate change, they’ve made sustainability a centerpiece of their enterprise. Channeling their inner Greta Thunberg, they promise that the event will be “historic for the climate” and “revolutionary Games like we’ve never seen before.”
Yet in the city where global leaders signed a landmark agreement in 2015 to limit postindustrial global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’re getting a recycled version of green capitalism that is oblivious in its incrementalism, vague with its methodology and loose with its accountability. It’s too late for Paris, but if the Olympic organizers truly want to be sustainable, the Games need to reduce their size, limit the number of tourists who travel from afar, thoroughly greenify their capacious supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability. Until then, the Olympics are a greenwash, a pale bit of lip service delivered at a time when climatological facts demand a systematic transformation in splendid Technicolor.
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Greenwashing is nothing new for the sports world, where a massive chasm exists between sustainable word and deed. Sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup have long voiced concern for the environment and claimed to proffer solutions while doing the bare minimum—if anything—to make genuine ecological improvements.
Nevertheless, Olympic organizers swear they are scything a fresh path. “We want the legacy to be different,” Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris 2024 Olympics, told Time magazine. “We’ve promised to cut the carbon footprint in half from the London Olympics in 2012.” Those Olympics in London emitted around 3.3 million metric tons of CO2. Paris 2024 is aiming for 1.5 million metric tons.*
To be sure, this summer’s Paris Olympics have made significant sustainability strides. But their earnest efforts have raised a broader question: Can the Olympics truly be an environmentally sustainable event? “There is no version of a sustainable Games as of yet,” said Madeleine Orr, author of Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport, in an interview with the Real News Network. This sentiment is echoed by many, including Christine O’Bonsawin, an Indigenous sport scholar and member of the Abenaki Nation at Odanak in Quebec, who dubbed such measures an “Olympic sustainability smokescreen.” The modern-day supersized Olympics, with its fossil-fuel-guzzling ways, is simply not compatible with an authentic sustainability agenda.
So how has Paris fared?
To limit their carbon footprint, organizers have kept venue construction to a minimum by building only two new sports facilities—an aquatic center and a climbing venue—and two additional sites: the Media Village for journalists and the Olympic Village, where athletes will reside during the Games. Organizers have made an effort to deploy bio-sourced materials—especially wood—and to reuse and recycle supplies, such as the seats in the aquatic center, which are constructed exclusively with local plastic waste. Construction of the Olympic Villageaspires to limit carbon intensity—the amount of carbon dioxide released to create a kilowatt-hour of electricity—by expending less than 650 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per meter squared (kgCO2e/m2), half of France’s average for the construction of office structures (1,400 kgCO2e/m2) and multifamily housing (1,300 kgCO2e/m2).
The Paris Olympics have a robust action plan for “sustainable catering” that aims for zero food waste. Organizers are curbing carbon emissions by procuring 80 percent of ingredients from local sources—thereby limiting “food miles,” the distance from field to plate. They are planning to compost food, reduce animal products by 50 to 60 percent and double the amount of plant-based products on the menu. Moreover, four of every five Paris 2024 venues sit within a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) radius and are less than 30 minutes from the Athletes’ Village. Paris organizers also assert that 100 percent of the electricity used at Olympic venues will be renewable.
All this is good, but is it enough? Not according to a report by Carbon Market Watch and Éclaircies, the environmental watchdogs that have skewered Paris 2024 organizers for their lack of transparency and precision: “the strategy,” the groups say, “lacks detailed methodologies and comprehensive monitoring, and is not clearly communicated.” Take that 100 percent renewable electricity claim. Turns out not all “renewable electricity certificates” are created equal. This may sound wonky, but a gap can emerge between a renewable energy certificate, which is an accounting tool, and actual procurement of renewable energy. Will the renewable energy be produced and consumed in the same geographical area? Will the certificate actually contribute to additional renewable energy? The New Climate Institute notes that acquiring renewable electricity certificates “has historically contributed very little to the development of additional renewable energy installations in Europe and the United States” because of an “oversupply of certificates and associated low prices, along with implicit double counting.”
What this means is that the opacity surrounding which market instruments have been used, Carbon Market Watch and Éclaircies say, “makes it impossible to analyze the true impact of the Olympics’ strategy on climate change.”
Paris 2024 organizers’ adoption of deceptive phrases such as “climate-positive” and “carbon-neutral”—which they abandoned after facing public pressure—has also bred credible skepticism from sustainability watchdogs.
And the Paris Games are creating straight-up environmental damage. Tahiti, the location of the Olympic surfing competition, is home to a coral reef that was damaged in the process of installing a completely optional tower for the Olympics. Activists in Teahupo’o shared excruciating footage of a construction barge grinding up the delicate coral reef, jump-starting an online petition to jettison the tower that was signed by more than 250,000 people. Olympic officials backpedaled, scaling back the tower plan.
The biggest portion of greenhouse gas emissions for major sports events—approximately 85 percent, by some estimates—derives from travel to the event by fans, journalists and athletes. Paris organizers’ reliance on notoriously misleading carbon offsets can enable “carbon colonialism”—offloading dubious projects on the Global South that service the eco-ledgers of the Global North. For instance, an Oakland Institute investigation revealed that a forestry company based in Norway arranged for carbon offsets in Uganda that severely disrupted the lives of locals by ramping up pollution and forcing evictions. The carbon footprint of international travel to attend the Olympics in Paris—let alone Tahiti, which sits a whopping 9,765 miles from Paris—is massive, yet Games organizers have generally offered vague platitudes rather than concrete action plans.
Speaking of concrete, Paris 2024 chose to build a temporary skate park at the Place de la Concorde that a MediaPart investigation describes as a “concrete avalanche.” The president of a French skate park group called the project “environmental and economic nonsense.” Concrete has been dubbed “the most destructive material on Earth” for its unquenchable thirst for water and knack for choking out natural habitats, and there are obstacles to recycling it.
This was a wholly optional move by the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee; they’ve scored an own goal.
In theory, the Paris organizers should have been able to look to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for guidance. After all, the Olympic Charter states that the IOC’s mission is “to encourage and support a responsible concern for environmental issues ... and to require that the Olympic Games are held accordingly.” And yet scholars have concluded that the IOC is “one of the largest culprits of greenwashing in the sporting world.” One IOC sponsor, Coca-Cola, is the world’s biggest producer of branded plastic waste. Another sponsor, Toyota, was hit with a $180-million fine for consistently violating the Clean Air Act. A third, Samsung, was singled out by the New Climate Institute and Carbon Market Watch for its greenwashing.
One academic study that investigated the sustainability of 16 different Olympic Games spanning 1992 through 2020 found that environmental follow-through has actually diminished over time. The four least sustainable Olympics—the Sochi 2014, Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and London 2012 Games—were all recent.
As people descend on Paris over the next several days and the Olympics commence, we can be grateful for the opportunity the Games afford the athletes themselves. The Paris 2024 Olympics may slice slightly against the zeitgeist of the egregious greenwashing of sports mega-events of the past, but a significant fissure between symbolism and substance remains.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
*Editor’s Note (7/25/24): This sentence was edited after posting to correct the emissions figures.