Via The Economist, a report on the impact of climate change on the Olympics:

When Paris submitted its bid for this year’s Olympics back in 2017 it made a bold claim: the city would put on the greenest-ever games. Shortly before the event began in July, one of the organisers talked me through what they had done to make good on that promise. The list was exhaustive, and impressive. It included sourcing the majority of food from within France, leasing (rather than buying) some 600,000 pieces of furniture and using almost exclusively existing buildings. All this was effective: organisers reckon the Paris Olympics will produce roughly half the emissions of previous games. 

But one measure received attention for the wrong reasons. The decision not to build air conditioning into the athletes’ village was roundly criticised by other countries, which worried that it would harm competitors’ performance. Observers pointed out that the move did little to reduce emissions, as most of Paris’s electricity comes from nuclear power. Officials insisted that the apartments, which will become housing after the games, were designed to stay cool and proved an important point about sustainable urban planning. Eventually, though, they allowed teams to rent portable air-conditioners at their own expense. National delegations, mostly from rich countries, hired almost 3,000 units. 

As well as being embarrassing for the hosts, the row highlighted a growing problem for the games, which are struggling to adapt to a changing climate while lessening their impact on it. The first part of that problem has long been apparent at the winter Olympics, which increasingly depend on artificial snow and ice. But it was also made obvious at Tokyo’s summer games in 2021, when a hot and humid spell caused several competitors to collapse or withdraw.

After a comparatively cool start to this year’s events, temperatures in Paris rose above 35°C last week. The hot spell would once have been considered rare in Europe. No longer. Amid the heat, pre-agreed protocols kicked in, including extra water breaks in tennis and football matches and monitoring horses’ body heat with thermal-imaging cameras. Such measures certainly help, but there is a limit to how much they can protect athletes. It seems likely that future Olympics will require more drastic changes.  

Even the most committed organisers can only reduce the event’s environmental footprint by so much. Despite cutting emissions significantly the Paris Olympics will still produce the same amount of carbon as some small countries do in a year. And the pressure to appear as sustainable as possible—while still pulling huge numbers of athletes, broadcasters and spectators to a single city—can lead to the kind of questionable decision-making that this week left those athletes without air conditioning stuck in sweltering heat overnight. (Several of them complained that the other cooling measures weren’t sufficient.) Writing in a recent edition of The Economist, David Goldblatt called for a pause to the games to send a signal about the urgency of the climate crisis. That looks unlikely. But it is clear that the Olympics in their current form are increasingly incompatible with a warming world.