Olympics — Data & Analysis by Khor Reports

When Beijing was announced as the host for this year’s Winter Olympics, two bold claims were made: Beijing as the first dual Olympic city in the world to host both the summer and winter games, and the 2022 Winter Olympics as the first Olympic event to be entirely carbon neutral.

The carbon neutrality claim drew much attention, unsurprising given the fact that the games are being held in a city with little to no natural snow. Consequently, there have been questions as to whether the games are sustainable in the first place if artificial snow had to be created (although admittedly, the number of locations where the Winter Olympics could be held naturally is diminishing). This, among other factors, appears to have undermined China’s commitment to a carbon neutral Olympic games to some extent despite the various efforts organisers have made to achieve it.

This is the Winter Olympics in the era of climate breakdown. The first winter games to rely almost entirely on fake snow. The hills outside Beijing are snow-free, so 49 million gallons of water and 300 snow guns have been used to create this. pic.twitter.com/wYtB6qMGII
— XR Cambridge (@xr_cambridge) February 6, 2022

The expected carbon footprint of the 2022 Winter Olympics 1.3 million metric tonnes of CO2e, a drop from the initial estimate of 1.6 million in 2018 (see table below), the reduction mainly being from the sharp drop in the number of international flights following the decision to limit ticket sales to only spectators from mainland China.

Source: Beijing 2022 Pre-Games Sustainability Report (2022)

Accordingly, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has detailed its carbon footprint methodology in 2018 (see table below for the emissions factors for different types of air travel).

Source: Carbon Footprint Methodology for the Olympic Games (2018)

To offset the projected emissions, China secured 1.7 million carbon credits, which would have costed about USD26 million, based on S&P Global Platt’s price of USD15.30/mtCO2e on 10 Feb 2022.

In addition to carbon credits, another notable effort by China is its afforestation projects in Beijing and Zhangjiakou (Hebei) totalling to approximately 80,000 hectares of forestland comprising about 60 million trees (estimated USD210/hectare or USD0.28/tree if the USD17 million value detailed in the table below is taken against this hectarage), which are expected to mitigate 1.1 million tonnes of CO2e. While commendable, experts have noted that this method of offsetting carbon has its problems, including the time it would take to offset the carbon in any meaningful way—80 to 100 years, provided that the trees are not cut down—and further recommend that the Olympics wean of carbon offset-based measures in future.