The capital of France, Paris, will host the thirty-third edition of the Olympic Games from 26 July to 11 August 2024. Billed as "the biggest event ever organised in France", the upcoming Olympics present themselves as a moment dedicated to sport — but not only. From the outset, the organising committee stressed the importance that the environment would play in this edition. The official website states that the Paris Games will be "unprecedented, because spectacular and sustainable". Sustainability is presented as the heart of the 2024 edition.

In the first year of preparation, the organisation had announced "climate-positive" Games. The belief was that Paris 2024 could be carbon neutral: emissions would be significantly reduced and those impossible to avoid would be offset. It is worth recalling that the Football World Cup in Qatar was the last major sporting event announced as carbon neutral, only to prove highly polluting.

Today, a few months from the Olympics, the organising committee's position has changed. Taking a more realistic and less ambitious approach, the Games now aim to halve CO2 emissions compared to Rio 2016 (the Tokyo edition is not taken as a reference because it had no spectators due to Covid-19 restrictions). In other words, Paris 2024 has set itself the goal of not exceeding 1.5 million tonnes of CO2.

Despite this ambition, the event has attracted a great deal of criticism from experts and activists who have accused the Paris Olympics of not being truly green. Will the Paris 2024 edition be genuinely eco-responsible, or will it represent yet another case of greenwashing?

The Olympic Games are no longer sustainable for the planet © Veronica Gennari

The event, despite the goals promoted by Paris, has attracted a great deal of criticism © Veronica Gennari

Fewer constructions, sobriety and bicycles

To achieve the goal of halving CO2 emissions, the Paris 2024 organisation has announced a series of concrete, specific targets to be met before, during and after the event. Among these are targets related to construction. Paris 2024 is indeed billed as an edition that will build little, making use of many existing infrastructures and creating (a small number of) new ones that are eco-responsible and reusable. For construction purposes, the organisation announces that it has already engaged several companies operating on the basis of a solidarity economy and that it has already planned, from the design stage onwards, a second life for temporary infrastructures. Paris 2024 will also make use of many existing structures, many of them already built for Olympic purposes. Mael Besson, a specialist in ecological transition in sport, former spokesperson for WWF and head of the sustainable development and ecological transition mission at the French Ministry of Sport from 2010 to 2018, has pointed out that certain structures are a legacy of the 2012 Olympic Games, which were subsequently won by London and therefore never previously used in Paris.

"There is another important aspect to consider," explains Besson. "These are the first Olympic Games not to require major construction works." Before this edition, the organising committee always required the creation of large competition venues capable of hosting large numbers of visitors, which subsequently stood empty. The 2004 Athens Games are a case in point. In French, these vast abandoned infrastructures are known as elephants blancs (white elephants). They are non-reusable buildings capable of hosting extremely large numbers of people, and thanks to this organisational change, they will not be present in Paris.

Another goal of Paris 2024 is to place "sobriety at the service of spectacle". In concrete terms, this means that the French Olympic Games do not aim to be less spectacular, but to be both spectacular and sustainable. The idea is, for example, not to build large new infrastructures but to showcase the city's cultural heritage, given that many competitions will take place right in the city centre, alongside the capital's iconic landmarks. Mael Besson considers this point very important: it is indeed one of the first times that "a sober event is not synonymous with dullness," he says.

A third goal that has met with the approval of a large proportion of citizens is the push to use bicycles. The city of Paris already has the goal of becoming one hundred per cent cycle-friendly and is pursuing it through two cycling schemes (plan vélo). Ahead of the Games, Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced a plan to make every Olympic venue accessible by bicycle. The plan is to create a cycling network of sixty kilometres linking the various competition venues, to expand bicycle parking and to increase the capacity of Vélib (the bicycle-sharing service operating in the capital).

The exemplary role of the Olympics: from the veggie burger to the plastic bottle

Besson specifies that, when analysing the organisation's objectives, the exemplary dimension cannot be overlooked. For the sport and transition expert, it is essential to consider that the Olympics are a major event, global in nature, broadcast live on television and followed by sponsors. An action taken at a major event inevitably has a very wide resonance. This aspect plays a dual role. On one hand, it promotes new habits and behaviours, such as a vegetarian diet. The food offering will indeed place an emphasis on plant-based options, even though animal proteins will not be eliminated.

"The importance given to vegetarian food in a context like the Olympic one will help to normalise a more sustainable diet."

Mael Besson

On the other hand, the demonstrator effect can be highly damaging. Paris 2024's proposal to ban single-use plastic has already been abandoned. Plastic will therefore be present and, as such, visible on live television. "The use of plastic doesn't really have a major impact at a single event," Besson explains, "but it has a demonstrator effect. If we allow the consumption of a plastic bottle, it will create an imitation effect once it's seen on television." To put it another way, images of athletes drinking from single-use bottles will not help reduce plastic consumption.

The charter of fifteen eco-responsible commitments

The Paris 2024 Olympics, along with other sporting events such as the Tour de France and Roland Garros, have signed up to the Carta dei quindici impegni eco-responsabili, a document drawn up by the Ministry of Sport together with WWF (the environmental protection organisation). Through its fifteen points, this document serves to define the objectives an event must meet in order to call itself eco-responsible. The objectives are highly specific, thereby preventing certain major events from claiming to be environmentally conscious while doing only the bare minimum.

Among the commitments set out in the charter, one notable example is the focus on mobility, which consists of ensuring ninety per cent of journeys are made by sustainable means (such as bicycles or public transport) and eliminating 95 per cent of flights where the journey can be completed in under five hours by other means (such as by train). A second commitment concerns waste: in order to call itself eco-responsible, a sporting event must reduce single-use plastic by ninety per cent.

Signing up to the charter will certainly help Paris 2024 to be more environmentally mindful, but will it be enough to define the event as eco-responsible? According to Mael Besson, the Olympic Games "will probably meet many of these points, but not all of them." One of the problems, he explains, will certainly be meeting the food-related objectives. "The charter is ambitious; few events manage to honour the food commitment." The first point of the charter stipulates, in fact, that in order to be eco-responsible, an event must provide eighty per cent of its food offering sustainably. In concrete terms, this means a sporting event must provide eighty per cent local and seasonal produce, of which at least thirty per cent must be organic and thirty per cent certified. It must also reduce its offering of animal products by at least half and aim to eliminate food waste entirely. Despite the Olympics' attention to plant-based options, it is therefore difficult to imagine now that it will manage to satisfy the first point of the charter.

The (controversial) offsetting of emissions

One of the points in Paris 2024's environmental project is based on CO2 offsetting. Georgina Grenon, Director of Environmental Excellence for Paris 2024, is the first to address it.

Georgina Grenon @geogrenon2024

𝕏

Les Jeux de #Paris2024 seront neutres en carbone:
↘️ Réduction de moitié des émissions de GES
🌍 Compensation intégrale, sur le périmètre de responsabilité le plus large

Cette ambition que nous partageons avec la Ville de @Paris guide notre action au quotidien

♥ 6💬 2 11 dic 2020 · Apri su X →

CO2 emissions offsetting is a sustainability strategy based on the idea that the emissions produced can be offset by actions that generate an equal quantity of carbon dioxide reduction. This concept is frequently criticised at a scientific level, because it leads people to believe that the emissions produced can be cancelled out by other positive actions for the environment, such as creating a green space in a given city.

"With the concept of offsetting, there is a risk of conveying the idea that we can neutralise the emissions produced. This is false. It is not a cancellation. Offsetting consists of producing other contributions that reduce CO2, often in other parts of the planet, but they do not erase the emissions already released."

Mael Besson

The crédits carbone strategy has already been accused of being a way of "easing one's conscience," as climatologist Valérie Masson-Delmotte states in an interview with Franceinfo. The climatologist goes on to add that there is not yet a sufficiently rigorous framework to guarantee the credibility of offsetting actions. The emissions framework for the Olympics is, in fact, approximate, as Besson also points out. "For the moment the carbon balance (bilan carbon) is a forecast," he says. "These are estimates, but there are still many variables" — variables that therefore make it difficult to anticipate the offsetting that would eventually need to be put in place. On this point, it is worth recalling that the European Commission itself approved, in March 2023, new legislation to combat greenwashing, in which the offsetting strategy is not banned but is accepted only if made more transparent.

"Less catastrophic" games

From the forecasts, it can be concluded that the Paris 2024 Olympics will indeed be a less polluting edition than previous ones. Mael Besson explains that the mere fact of not building so many new structures will bring about an emissions reduction of around 45 per cent. Before labelling Paris 2024 as eco-responsible, however, several aspects need to be considered. The first is the question of transport. Paris will indeed encourage the use of bicycles and public transport, which are well developed in the capital, but this will not prevent foreign fans, players and support staff from travelling to France from great distances, often by plane. "One has to bear in mind that in general, and not only in the case of the Olympic Games," says Besson, "the problem with major sporting events is the enormous use of transport, particularly air travel." Construction is therefore a major problem, but one that comes in second place. The biggest problem for the Olympics — arising from air traffic — has not been addressed in any way. Paris 2024 will therefore have a lower environmental impact, but "the Olympic Games are still too large for the planet's limits," adds Mael Besson.