sustainable development goals

Paris 2024 Olympics: Transformative Sustainability or Greenwashing Controversy?

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games aimed to be the greenest ever, hosting a summit to accelerate sport’s contribution to sustainable development goals by reducing emissions and implementing carbon mitigation projects. Critics labeled the event a “greenwashing nightmare,” citing vague methods and limited accountability. Despite challenges, the event’s focus on pre-game carbon mitigation represents a significant paradigm shift for major sporting events globally.

Changing the Paradigm of Major Sports Events

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games promised to be the greenest in history. On the Eve of the games, French President Emmanual Macron and the French Development Agency hosted the first Sport for Sustainable Development Summit, which gathered Heads of State, the International Olympic Committee, and the World Health Organization to accelerate the contribution of sport to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

The Olympic Games is one of the largest, most logistically complex global events. Host countries spend billions on new infrastructure, stadiums, athlete accommodation, Olympics venues, and upgrading transport. It is a mammoth undertaking, but it is also carbon intensive. Since Paris started planning for this year’s games in 2017, Paris 2024 aimed to be a game changer in the way that sports approaches its climate impacts.

The aim was to halve the emissions of this year’s games compared to the average of London 2012 and Rio 2016. There were two main goals: to reduce Games-related emissions and support carbon mitigation and capture projects. The former was the most significant. The organising committee pulled out all stops to comprehensively control and assess the entire carbon ecosystem of the event with both direct and indirect scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions from the carbon footprint from athletes and biodiversity impacts, to infrastructure, catering, waste, and even spectator travel.

The organising committee included a world-first Ecological Transformation Committee, setup to control, reduce, and reassess its carbon emissions throughout the run-up to the Games. The Ecological Transformation Committee was chaired by Gilles Boeuf and included nine experts across the areas of carbon impact, biodiversity, circular, economy, energy, catering, digital technology, temporary construction, innovation, and change management. The Committee was joined by representatives from Paris City Council, the French Ministry of Sport, the French Ministerial Delegation for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (DIJOP), the Ile-de-France Region, the Seine-Saint-Denis Department, Métropole du Grand Paris, the National Olympic and Paralympic Committees, and the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME), and a representative from the Paris 2024 Athletes’ Commission. This breadth of expertise gave strength to the objectives they were trying to achieve.

Have we been greenwashed?

The pure scale of any Olympic Games dictates that it will always have a colossal effect on climate and host communities. This has led Paris 2024 to be labelled a ‘greenwashing nightmare’ by many who argue that this event is awash with vague methodology and limited accountability. There seems to be a lack of transparency and third-party monitoring in these Games that only contributes to the image of the Olympic Games being an “Olympic sustainability smokescreen”, as dubbed by Christine O’Bonsawin, an Indigenous sport scholar and member of the Abenaki Nation at Odanak in Quebec. Because of this lack of transparency, climate and sustainability watchdogs argue that we cannot verify claims that Paris 2024 is carbon-neutral or climate positive.

Researchers contend that the International Olympics Committee is one of the biggest greenwashing institutions in the world. Past attempts to assess and compensate the massive environmental and ecological impacts of the Games have been said to perpetuate “carbon colonialism”—offloading emissions through uncertain projects in the Global South that mainly service the Global North.

While I tend to agree with the transformative limitations of unclear climate accounting methodologies and stoic adhesion to market fixes, changing the status quo, especially of a dominant global event and institution such as the Olympics is impossible to achieve overnight. All change has to start somewhere, and the mindset behind such change promises a great deal for future direction.

The difference between the climate approach to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and other previous major sporting events is that Paris 2024 sought to change the model of carbon assessment from post-games to a pre-game carbon mitigation model. Through this model, Paris 2024 undertook a holistic vision of offsetting emissions in a major carbon impact reduction target and strategy. This paradigm shift, flipping the mitigation hierarchy to avoiding and reducing emissions first rather than a pure offset and compensation strategy is highly significant.

Throughout modern history, the neoliberal approach to climate change has been more focused on offsets and carbon markets. It is a doctrine that believes in the power of commodities over conservation and that there are limits to environmentalism within the sphere of economic growth.

This ‘ARO’ – avoid, reduce, offset (last) – approach makes it difficult to skip over the typically harder and more expensive, bottom-of-the-pyramid mitigation priorities of avoid and reduce, which can happen when relying on a post-diem assessment that leaps straight to compensation as a first tactic.

What does this mean for other major sporting events?

Major sporting events are responsible for a whopping 50 to 60 billion tonnes of tCO2e globally every year. The most logical approach to reducing the climate impact of sport is to reduce the size and scale of these events. As with the Olympics, in their current formats, these events can never be truly sustainable and will always have a large environmental impact. However, avoiding them altogether is not black and white.

Sports – both taking part and being a spectator – has a proven social and economic benefit that goes beyond socio-economic, geographic, and cultural barriers. Sporting events strengthen social networks and build a sense of belonging for participants, fostering identity and building a sense of community character and cohesion for those involved. They can stimulate economic development for disadvantaged communities and inspire social change. Conversely, they can also be the root cause of human rights violations, slavery, unbridled nationalism, and massive-scale pollution.

To help address the entire carbon footprint of the Games, Paris 2024 declared that it developed an online tool, Climate Coach for Events for event organisers to understand and reduce the climate impact of major sporting events. This app is free for organisations to use and estimates the carbon footprint across ten categories including catering, accommodation, travel, infrastructure and energy, sports equipment, logistics, site preparation, promotional items, digital material, and waste; and provides a breakdown of the biggest source of emissions. In the same psychology of sports coaching, the app then provides a customised programme of over a hundred tangible measures that organisers can then implement in their planning to reduce their event’s carbon footprint.

Addressing climate impacts at the scale and complexity of something like the Olympics before the event demonstrates that it’s not too farfetched for other large sporting events to follow suit. Assessing the achievement of pre-emptive change rather than just rely on post-diem assessments to understand event impacts is a positive move.

Reinventing mega sporting events to realign them with international climate goals sounds like an impossible task. Of course, there is plenty more that could have always been done at the 2024 Olympics, by all – organisers, spectators, and athletes. The sheer scale of such events needs to be re-evaluated as a matter of urgency, but this event has opened pathways for thinking differently about the impacts and contributions of major sporting events, and other large events in general. Perhaps one of the greatest legacies of the Paris 2024 Olympics is that the opportunity to pioneer sustainable transformative thinking about major events proved not only possible, but even desirable.

In the ever-wise words of Nelson Mandela, “It always seems impossible until it is done”. No other thoughts resonate better with how we can address the world’s most challenging climate issues. The reinvention of future climate action in sport is on the horizon.

Read the 2024 Games sustainability reports here

COP27 – Systems Change for Climate Action

On day 2 of the COP27, session 3: High-level Session on Systems Change and Climate and Sustainability Innovations examined the deep paradigm shift needed for effective climate action. There was one key overarching message that I took from this session that also resonated with my own work: we need a radical rethink of our economic systems, social justice, and the way we approach natural resources.

There were two issues that panelists argued need addressing in terms of innovation if we are to address climate change effectively and timely: 1) decoupling human wellbeing from the use of natural resources; 2) power, or rather the decentralization of power. Both issues are addressed in a Buen Vivir framework, which is one reason why I focus on the concept, not only for social wellbeing but ecological wellbeing too. It ties into yesterday’s discussion on empowering local communities for climate action.

Janez Potocnik, Co-Chair of UN International Resource Panel hit the nail on the head when he argued that we need to move from an economy that sees humans as external to nature, to one which understands humans are a part of nature. He also stated that we need to remove the causes which lead to negative impacts, of which extractivism is a core function because it is a driver of human needs, but it is also the cause of great inequalities.

Janez argued that to live sustainably, we must move to provisioning for human needs, rather than servicing existing paradigms. I argue further that in that, we must also provision for environmental needs. Without taking into consideration the needs natural resources, ecosystems and biodiversity have to continue to function and thrive, we risk destroying them to the detriment of society.

Dr Andres Steer, President of Bezos Earth Fund brought up the critical issue of power and control – that in the absence of empowering local communities to take action on the ground, any advances in innovation (whether that be technological, knowledge, economic, or otherwise) are void. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges to effective climate action, the ability for decision and policy-makers, and others who hold the balance of power to cede some of that power to local communities to identify and implement solutions.

We see this with the concept of neoliberal development, under which the idea of sustainable development – and multilateral policymaking forums – sit. The overarching paradigm sees one set of values as dominant and therefore urges everyone to take the same approach, without having any idea about local challenges and the context on the ground. Dr Steer urged the UN to consider this transformative climate action, pleading, “as we think about changing the system, let’s not forget that on Monday morning we need to address real problems on the ground.” In other words, high-level aspirational commitments are nice, “and make for good dinner party conversation”, but are not always conducive to feeding effective solutions in real-time.

In closing this session, the facilitator summarised that “we have called for radical rethink. We have called for accepting that we will have to act in crisis. We are not going to be dealing with a world that is not in crisis.”

On that note, it is reassuring to hear the acknowledgment that frameworks and concepts like Buen Vivir, Donut Economics, Degrowth, Circular Society, and others that were once considered too ‘radical’ and pie-in-the-sky, could bring the kinds of holistic empowerment solutions the world needs in times of urgent climate crisis. Now it is about taking these from idea to action.

A Good Life for the SDGs

Time to change the lens for sustainability?

The Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to social and environmental sustainability, with an overarching goal of ending poverty and protecting the planet by 2030. Universal is the keyword. This means they apply to everyone, everywhere, regardless. This makes them more aspirational than practical and because of this, it’s argued that they are impossible to achieve. Indeed, by all accounts, they are failing. And, we’re running out of time.

The 2022 Progress Report on the SDGs details the immense challenge ahead of us in terms of achieving social, environmental and economic sustainability. The report admits a backward slide against the Goals (albeit in the face of significant “cascading crises”, most notably in terms of poverty, climate change, and environmental indicators.

Climate change and sustainability come hand in hand. A changing climate is a major challenge for social and environmental sustainability. In turn, the way modern society functions is far from sustainable long, or even medium term and is hastening the speed of climatic changes that are occurring.

The IPCC has confirmed that climate change is caused by human activity, and it is happening at a speed faster than first realised. Thwaites “doomsday” Glacier in Antarctica, for example, is melting at a speed faster than could ever have been anticipated, threatening global sea levels to rise up to .6m https://theconversation.com/thwaites-glacier-the-melting-antarctic-monster-of-sea-level-rise-podcast-191057

UN Secretary-General, António Guterres has called the current climate situation a “code red for humanity”. Everyone everywhere will (and already is) experience the wrath of the past decades’ inaction. As I have argued many times, we cannot continue to decouple human and environmental wellbeing. These “cascading crises” are complex, and they are entangled.

The outlook is not good. While it seems like we are on a one-way course for destruction, there is definitely hope in limiting the scale of future destruction, if we band together, separately. That is, if we change divert the approach from ‘universal’ to ‘contextual’. Immediately.

In the words of Sneddon et al. (2006)

“Sustainability may yet be possible if sufficient numbers of scholars, practitioners and political actors embrace a plurality of approaches to and perspectives on sustainability, accept multiple interpretations and practices associated with an evolving concept of “development”, and support a further opening up of local-to-global public spaces to debate and enact a politics of sustainability.”

Because climate change is a global challenge (perhaps the biggest!) with no geographical limits it requires a global response. Let me rephrase that, it requires a response globally, that is anchored in local geographical, climatic, ecological, socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts.

The thing about place is that no one locale is the same. Place is a complex notion. Each comes with its own identity, challenges, and socio-economic situation. The identifying factors aren’t just social, each place is unique with its own environment, biodiversity, ecosystems, topographical, geological, and geographical advantages, and disadvantages. Place influences a person’s identity and empathy towards nature, which plays a role in the motivation for climate and sustainability action. The perception of place is then vital to social and environmental justice at the community level. This makes the community context the most practical viewpoint for addressing social and environmental issues.

What’s more, climate change is not and will not affect each place equally. Each community will mount its own challenges that are unique to that place. So, it is nonsensical to then believe that we can apply a universal approach to these issues, even if they have global scope. Plus, large-scale transformational systemic change is inherently complicated, and especially drawn out – a major issue when dealing with issues on an urgent timescale like climate change.

Global declarations and treaties are a vital part of the international system. They are an important tool to set the wheels in motion for action in all parts of the world, and they outline states’ responsibilities and obligations in responding to challenges that affect us all. But, they are not effective in their own right. International action is firmly squared within the boundaries of neoliberalism, which promotes universal values in line with Western standards, and ignores the diverse realities of communities everywhere. This has indeed been one of the most common critiques in relation to global climate declarations. International climate diplomacy must be coupled with locally anchored solutions within a context that speaks to locally-identified needs and challenges, otherwise, they are all but useless.

What alternative approaches like Buen Vivir do is remove local action for social and environmental justice from ideal and aspirational universal values and provide local communities with agency to drive solutions that meet their realities. As a hypothetical example, let’s look at two climate-related flood disasters, the solutions that are required for (comparably) affluent communities in Northern New South Wales in Australia will not work in the poor communities of Pakistan which are currently experiencing climate flooding of biblical proportions.

Small-scale transformational change breaks up larger big-picture goals like the SDGs and makes them amenable to place and context. Smaller chunks are easier to swallow and (notwithstanding all the complexities in a community) quicker to achieve real change. Concepts like Buen Vivir also help reconcile the social and environmental aspects, that builds bridges between the two rather than having them almost compete for attention.

Local action for climate change is crucial and Buen Vivir provides a framework for locally driven solutions that build resilience, mitigate impacts, and allow communities to adapt in relation to their own realities. In that respect it provides a tool for increasing social and environmental wellbeing in the face of these challenges. Having local solutions unadulterated by the global agenda yet capable of working together in cooperation with it is vital for transformative action at this point. ‘Together yet apart’ – much like the catchphrase of the COVID lockdown period.

Even the upcoming COP27 in Egypt has recognised the importance of working together for implementation against the old notion of a single negotiated outcome. The Presidency Vision states the need “to replicate and rapidly upscale all other climate-friendly solutions towards implementation in developing countries”. “Together for implementation” is the theme, with the Presidency saying that implementation needs to happen “on time and at scale”, and be “specific, measurable, and impactful”.

Each of the principles of Buen Vivir has the potential to cooperate with the wider global Goals, but leaving it to the communities to identify the needs and respective solutions. I outline just how the principles converge with the Goals in my book and more recently paper published in the Community Development Journal .

Never before has the term “think globally, act locally” been more prevalent than now. And never has the call been more urgent!