Olympic events win pewter, rather than gold medals for sustainability

Major sporting events are merging one into another in the Global north, providing ongoing challenges to #urban #sustainability. After the final of the Euro 2024 football championship and the finals weekend at Wimbledon, the end of July 2024 will herald the launch of the Olympics in Paris.

The major global event will see 15 million spectators — including 2 million from abroad — join tens of thousands of athletes, journalists, volunteers, participants and organisers to watch three weeks of track and field and stadium events at facilities across the city. It provides the perfect arena to examine how the organisers have dealt with sustainability — as well as the athletes seeking to win gold and set new records.

The organisers have claimed this will be the greenest Olympics in history with a total carbon footprint half the size of those left by the London Olympics 2012 and the 2016 Rio Olympics. The greenest title is based on it offsetting more than will be emitted, making it the first international sporting event to do so.

The organisers of the London Olympics, watched by 11 million people, claimed its footprint came in at 3.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), slightly lower than the 3.4 million metric tons estimated in 2009. The Rio event broke the finishing tape at 3.6 million tons of which 2 million was offset through technological mitigation.

Paris’s case rests on its success in relying on 95% of existing or temporary venues for events such as the Stade France stadium, the National Velodrome for cycling, the Grand Palais on the Champ-de-Mars for judo and wheelchair rugby. It has built two new facilities, both in the relatively deprived outer-city banlieue of  Saint-Denis: an 8,000-seater stadium and the Olympic and Paralympic village. Two news subway lines will increase connections, including one to Orly international airport.

Of course, the Olympics deliver huge support to the other two pillars of sustainability other than the environment, namely social and economic benefits. If the event goes well, it will inject a feeling of civic pride among those Parisians who do not feel it is their home city. Investments such as the Saint-Denis venues and the new underground train lines will hopefully leave a positive legacy for residents and Paris citizens, respectively. The event will have provided much-needed income for hoteliers, restaurateurs, travel and transport firms and the city’s coffers.

Medal table

The issue, therefore, is how can one effectively evaluate the success of an Olympics’ sustainability without falling prey to organisers’ lavish public relations claims. Are the Olympics just business events that pay lip service to sustainability, or are they events that put into practice innovations to reduce emissions?

Six academics at Swiss universities and one from New York University sought to answer that question by designing a model that used nine indicators divided into three groups (to match the environmental, social and economic pillars of sustainability) to evaluate 16 summer and winter games between 1992 and 2020.

They analysed each event according to its ecological footprint (the amount of new construction; the number of visitors; and the size of the event;), its social dimension (social safety; the level of public approval; and application of the rule of law), and the economics (budget balance; the degree of financial exposure; and its long-term viability) to produce a score between zero and 100 for least and most sustainable, respectively.

The results were not pretty. On average the events scored 48, just below halfway but some measures such as “budget balance” received the lowest score, doubtless reflecting frequent cost overruns, followed closely by “new construction” and “social safety”.

But the more worrying finding was that the sustainability score deteriorated over time. Indeed the winners of the gold, silver and bronze medals (and the other ones to score well above 50) were quite dated: Salt Lake City (2202), Albertville (1992) and Barcelona (1992), respectively. Rio in 2o16 came second from bottom, and London 2012 fourth worst. More pewter than gold.

What lessons do the researchers offer? Firstly, make the events smaller to reduce visitor numbers and the consequent emissions footprint. Secondly, the events should be rotated between the cities that show the highest sustainability performance, also minimising new construction needed. Lastly, the governance should be upgraded by setting up an independent body to establish, track and police sustainability standards.

These changes are unlikely without a reassessment of the economics of the Olympics. The current looks to maintain or grow, rather than the reduce the number of attendees in order to support corporate sponsorship, while the International Olympic Committee would doubtless resist losing its overseeing role. Having a smaller pool of cities may already be happening: only Paris and Los Angeles bid for the 2024 games, with the latter awarded 2028 without a competition. Brisbane was selected for 2032 under a new IOC process whereby its Future Host Commission identifies a preferred candidate.

In an idealised world, perhaps cities could compete to show which can deliver the most sustainable Olympics, thus earning a genuine gold.