Paris strives for greenest ever games

France is rolling out plans to make Paris 2024 the most sustainable Olympic games to date.

Greening a global event

Comprised of 800 sporting events propped up by 15,000 athletes and 45,000 volunteers, 26,000 media professionals, and 13.4 million tickets sold, Paris has turned to a variety of sustainable solutions to ensure this year’s Olympic games are the greenest yet. Their headline pledge is a commitment to reduce the carbon footprint of the games by half compared to previous years, alongside a commitment to be the first games with an overall positive climate contribution.

The sporting sector contributes roughly 350 million tonnes of CO2e annually, making it a sector worth greening to deliver impactful climate results. However, what the Paris Olympics can deliver internally to improve their sustainability standards will have to compete with the carbon footprints of an international audience, with fans flying from all over the globe to view these sporting events.

Defining carbon goals

So what is Paris doing to make their games the greenest ever? For the first time, they will be tapping into a methodology which involves pre-defining a carbon budget for the games; this budget will be integrated into the event’s operations to ensure carbon emissions are halved relative to previous games. The budget outlines a goal to limit emissions to roughly 1.75 tonnes of CO2. By comparison, Tokyo 2020, Rio 2016 and London 2012 each emitted around 3.5 million tonnes of CO2.

Based on this budget, Paris is taking the ARO approach, with the addition of their own categories for improvement:

• Anticipate – using a predetermined carbon budget
• Avoid – Paris 2024 is using 95 per cent existing infrastructure to avoid the emissions associated with building new facilities
• Reduce – targeting excessive activities and wasteful operations
• Offset – looking at Scope 3 emissions, unavoidable emissions will be offset with environmental and social projects
• Mobilise – Climate Coach app launched to help employees recognise and reduce their emissions

A sustainable Olympic setting

The Athlete’s Village is the hub of all competitors at an Olympic games, and a key source of emissions. Paris have tapped into two key sources of renewable energy to power the Athlete’s Village this year: geothermal energy, and solar power.

Athletes will be sleeping on mattresses made from recycled fishing nets, bed bases from reinforced cardboard, and in buildings with biodiverse, nature-friendly rooftops to accommodate wildlife. Almost 9,000 trees have been planted around the village to accommodate local wildlife. In terms of what’s to follow, 2,800 of the Athlete’s Village apartments will be converted into liveable homes after the games.

As for the stadiums and venues, Paris will be installing LED lighting systems anticipated to deliver an 80 per cent carbon reduction compared with standard lighting. The Aquatics Centre, which needs to be moderated at certain temperatures, will harness 20 per cent of its power from rooftop solar PV. Overall, Paris has chosen to source the energy for this year’s games from six wind farms and two solar farms located in France. EDF Energy will be supplying the same quantity of electricity used by the Olympic games to the network.

Finally, focussing on fans attending the events, the Paris games will include 1,000km of cycle lanes, 20,000 new trees planted on the streets, 3,000 more pay-as-you-go bikes available to the public, and all Olympic venues have been made accessible by public transport.

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