My Take | France’s ‘greenest ever’ Olympics may turn out to be the least green
- Paris’ mayor has relented after initially ruling out air cons for athletes’ village, but excessive ice use risks damaging environment even more
So much for the French summer Olympic Games being the “greenest ever”. That, at first, was how Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris and a green fanatic, had advertised the Games. But the world’s biggest sports event this year may turn out to be not very green.
Hidalgo’s experiment, which includes not offering air conditioning in the rooms of the athletes’ village, should be a textbook example of unintended consequences.
You may have read that Hong Kong organisers have been scrambling to collect and ship enough portable air-con units to accompany our athletes. But we are not the only ones. Teams from the mainland, Canada, Britain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Denmark and Australia are all doing the same.
As to complaints that some teams from low-income countries can’t afford to bring their own air-con units, French Olympic organisers relented early this month and will offer such units to any team that requests them. All this could have been foreseen because France has been hit by unusual heatwaves in recent years.
In an earlier report titled, “Rings of fire: heat risks at the 2024 Paris Olympics”, researchers from Britain’s University of Portsmouth, non-profit NGO Climate Central and 11 Olympians warned that conditions in Paris this summer could be worse than the last Games in Tokyo in 2021.
“[I]ntense heat at the Paris Olympics in July-August 2024 could lead to competitors collapsing and in worst-case scenarios dying during the Games,” the report said.
