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The 2022 Winter Olympic games are coming to an end this weekend in China. The games have been surrounded by huge amounts of controversy, from diplomatic boycotts over human rights concerns to complaints over a Taiwanese athlete wearing a uniform with China written on it. One large area of controversy is the environmental impact of the games. Beijing is the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Olympic games, but that doesn’t mean it’s a city that’s particularly well suited to hosting the Winter Olympics in a sustainable way. The organising committee for the games claim that they’re the greenest games that the world has ever seen. The 26 venues for the games, including the training venues, all run entirely on renewable energy. But behind this front of an eco-friendly winter games lies other uncomfortable facts about their climate impact that seems to counter these claims of sustainability.
The biggest point of contention with the environmental impact of the Olympic games is the huge amounts of artificial snow that have been created to support the events. The National Alpine Ski Centre in Yanqing had only 2cm of snow between January and March last year. Yet this is the venue for downhill skiing and slalom. The venue for cross-country skiing, ski jumping and snowboarding events in Zhangjiakou also receives little snow, a fact that was picked up on by the International Olympic Committee in 2015 when China made their bid for the games.
Altogether, the games have used about 49 million gallons of water to make the artificial snow needed. In Yangqing, 200 snow cannons connected to a reservoir by pipes were used to shoot out the artificial snow. The north of China, particularly in Beijing, has experienced water shortages for many years. Despite having twenty percent of the world’s population, China has only six percent of the world’s freshwater resources and most of the groundwater resources are found in South China, not in the north where the Olympics are.
There are also concerns about the location of some of the Olympic venues, particularly the National Alpine Ski Centre. In 1985, the Songshan National Nature Reserve was founded in order to protect the forests there. However when China made their bid for the Olympics, they redrew the boundaries of the nature reserve to clear out a core area in order to build the ski centre. It had previously been illegal to enter the core area of the reserve without prior research permission from the government. Yet these rules were thrown out in order to build a ski slope on the Xiao Haituo mountain which is the second highest in Beijing. At the time, many people both in China and abroad took issue with this due to its impact on the natural ecosystems in the park and the 180 species of animals found there. However, such criticism was quickly shut down in China and dismissed by the International Olympic Committee and the building of the ski slope went ahead.
As with all large events, there are also other climate impacts such as the huge numbers of international flights required, as well as the impacts brought about by the pandemic such as huge numbers of PCR tests, masks and rapid tests that all generate large amounts of waste.
Of course, these issues are not unique to the Beijing Olympics. The previous Winter Olympics in Seoul also used large amounts of artificial snow. Climate Change is partly to blame, as less and less cities have the right conditions needed to host the games. Research shows that by the end of the century there’s a risk that only one city worldwide, Sapporo in Japan, will be suitable to host the Winter Olympics if global warming continues at the high level that it is on now. Questions therefore have to be raised about the degree to which the games are helping to bring about this decline. As with every Olympic Games since Taiwan began competing under the name ‘Chinese Taipei’ in 1984, there have been calls to allow Taiwanese athletes to compete under the name of ‘Taiwan’ under the Taiwanese flag. However, it’s possible that in a few decades it won’t matter what name Taiwan wants to compete under, because the Winter Olympics will simply become too unsustainable to hold.
