Going for green!
While gold has always been the color of victory at the Olympics, some of the success of this year's Games will be determined by another shade.
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The 2024 Olympics in Paris is going green. Organizers will attempt to make it the first carbon-neutral Olympics in modern history by offsetting more emissions than the Games create to limit its impact on the climate.
The goal is to cut the carbon footprint of the Olympics in half compared to previous editions. The last three Games producing an average of 3.5 million tons of CO2, which is more than the annual emissions of India and Germany combined.
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To do so, the Paris Olympics is using the standard ARO approach -- avoid, reduce, offset -- but adding in additional phases of forecasting emissions to gauge its carbon footprint and then mobilizing action to help those who follow the Games reduce their personal and professional carbon footprint.
Achieving these goals required major changes leading up to the two-week global competition.
"We believe the success of Paris is how we will commit to this, maybe, main challenge of the society at that time," said Tony Estanguet, the president of Paris 2024.
The Olympics will run on 100% green energy generated from new sources of wind and solar energy like windmills on the Normandy coast to solar panels on the roofs of venues in Paris.
Paris is also almost entirely using existing venues to host the Games rather than building new structures that would increase the carbon footprint. Only two new venues have been built -- for aquatics and basketball -- and temporary bleachers have been installed at some other sites.
Even the athletes' meals are being prepared differently, with local farms providing 80 percent of the 13 million meals served during the Games to lower emissions.
The city has also added 800 miles of new bike lanes and planted 300,000 new trees that will endure long after the Games' closing ceremony.
Georgina Grenon, the director of environmental excellence for Paris 2024, believes that the Games meeting their ambitious decarbonization goals on the grandest stage in sports would help show the world that it is possible.
"If this Games managed to send that message across and that message is heard," Grenon said, "I think we have all won a really good medal out of this."
Article compiled by Mike Gavin
