Paris 2024: a review of the efforts to halve the carbon footprint of the Olympic Games

Over the past 2 weeks the world has been running high on Olympic fever.

In many ways the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games brought with enthusiasm and controversy in almost equal parts.

The games started on July 26th with some historical records right off the start. For the first time the Olympics are perfectly gender-balanced with an equal number of men and women among the 10,500 athletes. The Paris Olympics broke another record by having 193 openly LGBTQ+ athletes competing.

But perhaps the most ambitious goal of all, was halving the carbon footprint of the games compared with the average for London 2012 and Rio 2016.  This commitment was at the centre of their candidature as a host city and remained a central piece as the city prepared to host the games. While we are yet to see the results of this particular race, there is certainly a lot to discuss about this paradigm shift in the sustainability of the Olympics.

I’ll start with the positives:

Changing the model: from a post-games assessment to a pre-games target

I applaud this step, and in my view, it is a crucial move towards a more sustainable event; one that I wish to see replicated across other major sports and entertainment events.

The first thing the organising committee did, was set a Carbon Budget. 1.58 million tonnes of CO2e (i.e. half the average of London’s 3.3 tonnes of CO2e and Rio’s 3.9 tonnes of CO2e). This to me is a super logical step, and while I’m not entirely surprised it hadn’t been used before, I think we should make carbon budgets a requirement for all large events, from the Super Bowl to the World Cup (FIFA), and beyond sports for concerts, festivals and other major gatherings.

Think about it, there’s no way any city, or government, or even any private institution would commit to organising an event of this nature, without first having a detailed financial budget. We need to know in advance how much all this will cost us, but in 2024 our interpretation of costs can no longer be driven by purely economic impact. The environmental cost is more important now than it’s ever been.

Setting a Carbon Budget is an excellent first step. The big task ahead is committing to that budget. Avoid or minimise hidden and unforeseen “costs” (i.e. emissions).

Tackle your Goliath first: in previous editions new building account for a major chunk of emissions

In London 2012 a whooping 60% of emissions were due to the construction of new buildings. Paris has taken drastic steps to significantly reduce this in net amount and share of overall emissions. For one, this Olympics has managed to repurpose existing venues instead of building new ones from scratch (with only one exception).

Paris organisers expect construction emissions to be no more than 450,000 tonnes of CO2e, which is 30% of their carbon budget.

In addition to repurposing existing infrastructure, where new buildings were required, innovation in sustainable construction played a huge role. The Olympic village, which is meant to be converted into housing after the games, is an incredibly innovative building that uses recycled and bio-based materials to reduce emissions by square meter. The building’s design was also made to minimise cooling requirements, initially no AC was planned. Furnishings were also eco-friendly, one example of that is the cardboard beds heavily covered in social media by some athletes.

Phase-out fossil fuels: powering the Olympics with renewable energy

Another major positive was connecting the games' sites to the public electricity grid and avoid using diesel-powered generators which have been favoured in previous games with the excuse of reliability. France’s energy mix makes of this a huge difference as the country counts with a reliable grid with generally low dependencies to fossil fuels (approx. 50%). This mix could certainly improve and become more renewable heavy (in line with the country’s targets). We are also not accounting for the fact that the largest share of the mix at 36.5 % continues to be nuclear and there’s some discussions on the sustainability of nuclear energy.

Still, this shift in energy consumption is a huge positive.

It’s not all roses!

In spite of some of these great initiatives, there are some areas where the organisers could have done better.

Let’s discuss some of the negatives:

The elephant in the room: Spectator travel to and from Paris

After construction and energy, the third focus for the organisers was food. Offering a more responsible catering with twice as much plant-based food in meals. There’s nothing wrong with offering a more sustainable diet, but food accounts for less than 1% of the footprint. It should not be in their top three priorities for decarbonisation.

Spectator travel to and from Paris accounts for the biggest chunk of the event’s Carbon Budget, and yet, they seem to have done very little to address or mitigate this. The official stance is

“this is not fully our responsibility, and we can't impact the choices people make and how they come here.”

If you ask me, that’s a cop out. You simply can’t just walk away from your biggest problem simply because it seems too hard to solve. If this becomes the global attitude towards decarbonisation, our net zero targets are in serious problems (even more so than they already are!).

Surfing tricky waves: the most carbon-intensive sport at “Paris”

Surfing debuted as an Olympic sport in Tokyo 2020 (2021). One of the biggest challenges faced by the organisations was the quality of the waves. While the surfing event in Tokyo ran smoothly, one of the main drawbacks was that the Japanese east coast was not ideal for a high-performance competition.

To address this, one early idea for Paris was to build an artificial wave pool facility. Thankfully they quickly walked away from that idea, as by itself it could have possibly put at risk the ambitious carbon targets.

The surfing event ended up being held in Tahiti, French Polynesia (16,000 Km from Paris). This was possible due to some flexibility on the Olympics’ committee “one host city” rules. Still this decision implies significant travel to a particularly small and disconnected settlement, meaning some infrastructure had to be built.

One of the greatest concerns was the new judges’ tower. An infrastructure that had to be built by drilling into the coral reefs, which scientists say could dire consequences for the reef ecosystems.

This problem is largely caused by the size of the event, as we introduce more sports, it will be increasingly unlikely that all events can be carried out in the same city. Which poses the question:

Is it possible to have a Green Olympics?

A 2021 study from Nature Sustainability looked at the environmental impact of 16 editions of Summer and Winter Olympics from 1992 to 2020. The researchers developed a model with 9 indicators to evaluate the sustainability of the Olympic games. The results showed that overall sustainability scores were medium and declining over time.

Their conclusions suggested three key actions should be adopted to make Olympic hosting more sustainable.

1. First, greatly reducing the size of the event;

2. second, rotating the Olympics among the same cities;

3. third, enforcing independent sustainability standards.

Clearly, the ambitions of the Paris Olympic games are most definitely admirable and major innovations have been implemented to help meet these ambitious goals. However, it is also clear that there is still major room for improvements and progress. We should also consider the possibility that the days of Olympic Games as we know them today are numbered.

We should start working towards a future more sustainable model that still enables us to enjoy the incredible performances of the world’s elite athletes.