The refrain is known. According to the organizing committee of the Beijing Winter Olympics, everything has been done to ensure that the sporting event has a “positive environmental impact”. But this virtuous discourse of the greatest dictatorship on the planet is very far from reality, say several experts. Admittedly, essentially symbolic commitments have been made, but after the Games, no one will be there to check whether the promises have been fulfilled.
A photo published recently by a Swiss journalist who flew over the region of Yanqing, site of the alpine ski competitions, showed an area without the slightest snow cover, with the exception of the layout of the slopes which descend from a mountain. There is indeed no natural snow at these 2022 Winter Games, which are held in areas that receive less than three centimeters of snow per year.
To remedy the problem, the Chinese organizers artificially produced 100% of the white cover needed to hold the various competitions, a first in Olympic history. And as the Beijing Games are held in a particularly arid region, the water needed to produce all this snow had to be transported by pipes over several tens of kilometres.
“It’s just not an environment conducive to snowmaking and you have to use at least 185 million liters of water to snow the ski slopes”, summarizes the Duty the geographer Carmen de Jong, researcher specializing in hydrology at the Faculty of Geography and Planning at the University of Strasbourg. This evaluation of the volume of water, which she considers very conservative, is equivalent to more than 75 Olympic swimming pools. But the report on the “sustainability” of the Games does not mention any volume of water.
Holding the Winter Games in a setting where the organizers had to make artificial snow is symbolic of this type of event, according to the urban and political geographer at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, Sven Daniel Wolfe. “I think it shows us that the most important thing here is the show, and that sustainability comes last,” he sums up.
What’s more, the Yanqing ski slopes that we will be able to see on our screens over the next few days have been built thanks to the destruction of part of the Songshan Nature Reserve, an important habitat for endangered species. However, this shadow on the board has been evacuated from the documents posted online to extol the ecological merits of the world sporting event. “They hid this element in the sustainability file and when obtaining the Games, they claimed that the tracks would not be in the nature reserve”, underlines Carmen de Jong. Chinese biologists who have denounced this situation have also been muzzled.
However, this is not the first time that the Winter Olympics have used artificial snow and the destruction of protected natural environments to hold competitions. At the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, more than 80% of the snow was produced by the organisers. And to build the necessary infrastructure, they razed part of the forests whose value was nevertheless recognized by UNESCO. Wild dumps have also emerged in several places, habitats of endangered species have been destroyed and environmental activists who have criticized the authorities have been imprisoned.
“Carbon neutral” games?
The Chinese organizing committee, however, promises a “green, inclusive, open and clean” approach for the holding of the Games in a country where democracy and freedom of the press are non-existent. According to the official website, “by choosing ‘sustainability for the future’ as its vision, Beijing 2022 is committed to making the necessary efforts to ensure that these Games have a ‘positive environmental impact. ” and will use biodegradable tableware in the preparation and organization of the Games”.
Beijing also claims that this event will be “carbon neutral”, mainly due to the use of “100% renewable” energy to power all the infrastructures, but also thanks to the compensation of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the ‘organization. In particular, the government has signed a partnership with the country’s largest oil company, PetroChina, to finance emission reductions.
The “positive environmental impact” touted by the organizers is however impossible to verify, insists Mohamed Reda Khomsi, professor in the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at UQAM. “There is a lack of transparency to verify the information provided by the organizers, in particular for carbon neutrality. Data cannot be validated. It is also easy to say that the Games will be carbon neutral, since the organizers do not take into account all greenhouse gas emissions. »
He adds that no one will be able to check if everything that has been promised has been done, especially for reforestation projects. “The International Olympic Committee does not have the necessary authority to ensure that promises will be kept,” recalls Mohamed Reda Khomsi.
Not durable
Anyway, whatever the host countries say, no edition of the Summer or Winter Olympics can claim to be “sustainable”, according to Sven Daniel Wolfe, co-author of a study published in April 2021 in the magazine Nature and covering the environmental analysis of 16 editions since 1992. Pandemic aside, each edition welcomes more athletes, events, infrastructures and spectators. However, this can only increase the environmental impacts.
“Considering that no edition of the Olympic Games since 1992 has been sustainable, I would be very surprised if those in Beijing broke this trend. Nor would I be surprised to learn that the results of these Games in terms of sustainability are worse than expected. This is often the case. But the moment these results become clear, the world’s attention has shifted to the next Games, with the next round of fantastic promise,” argues Sven Daniel Wolfe.
“We live in a world that values profit and growth, and the Olympics reflect that reality,” he adds. “So while the International Olympic Committee recognizes the importance of sustainability and strives to increase it, our results reflect the real values of our global culture. In fact, money trumps everything else. »
In this image war where each organizing committee claims to be “greener” and more “sustainable” than the previous one, we are content above all with measures that do not call into question the trend towards gigantism, affirms Mohamed Reda Khomsi. “There is an effort and an awareness, but the efforts remain essentially symbolic and they do not limit the environmental impacts. »
“Recycling, reforestation and offsetting greenhouse gas emissions are all worthwhile measures, but the International Olympic Committee should set targets with constraints. We could have done this with China, as soon as the Games were awarded in 2015, to check whether the objectives have been achieved. But since none of this has been done, we will have to take the word of the Chinese authorities.