The fanfare and attention to the Olympic Games, while exciting, can often overshadow the negative environmental impacts of the tournament. The Olympics are one of the most highly anticipated sporting events in the world. In the two weeks of competition during the 2024 Summer Paris Games, there were an average of 30.6 million viewers across 7,000 total hours of coverage—an 82 percent increase from the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021. The organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics set out to create a more environmentally sustainable Olympics without compromising the nature of the competition.
According to a 2021 analysis from the University of Lausanne, New York University, and the University of Bern, while organizers have claimed that the Games have become more sustainable, the actual environmental impacts have become more harmful. The Tokyo Olympics emitted an estimated total of 2.73 million tons of CO₂, and these Games were held without fans due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In comparison, the 2016 Rio Olympics emitted a total of 4.5 million tons of CO₂, with about 55 percent of emissions coming from spectators.
The organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics strove to break this pattern of emissions. The Paris 2024 Board of Directors set a goal in the beginning of their planning process to emit no more than one-half of the planet-warming emissions of the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics. This would place their maximum emissions at 1.58 million metric tons of CO₂e. At the time of writing no reports on emissions resulting from the 2024 Paris Olympics has been released.
Emissions were organized into three primary categories: construction, transportation, and operations. To address emissions from construction, recycled venues were used to host different events and, in cases where something new needed to be built, renewable or low-carbon materials were used. Transportation was more difficult to manage as the Olympic Committee had no control over how people moved around the city. Therefore, the main strategy employed was encouraging people, athletes included, to use public transportation. Olympic teams from the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium, and Switzerland all used public transportation to arrive in Paris. Finally, to lessen the environmental impacts of the operations of the Games, the Board of Directors planned to get energy not only from the French power grid, which is powered primarily by nuclear energy, but also from solar panels floating along the Seine and on Olympic buildings. Additional energy-saving measures were taken including placing trees and cooling misters around the city, improving building insulation, building light-colored surfaces, and installing geo-thermal water-cooling systems.
Despite these efforts, a lack of transparency over sustainable strategies such as procuring 100 percent renewable energy has increased skepticism. Jules Boykoff, a professor at Pacific University, publicly questioned how sustainable the Games truly were. As of writing, no official reports have been published that evaluate the sustainability of the Paris Olympics. The IOC has created a standard of reporting on environmental impacts after an Olympic Games has concluded, but this is rarely done. While the evaluation of the 2024 Paris Olympics has yet to be released, the planning for the 2026 Winter Olympics has already begun. Organizers have issued statements that they are hoping to adopt a “realistic, concrete, and progressive approach” to sustainability, but no detailed plans have been provided.
