China wants to use the 2022 Winter Olympics to showcase its green credentials, but the environmental cost of the Games, which rely on artificial snow, has been a cause for concern.
It is difficult to independently verify what China has said about the Games, which start on February 4th. Environmentalists told AFP that they fear reprisals from the authorities if they analyze Beijing’s ecological goals.
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Or what does China promise? China has pledged to use only wind, hydro and solar energy, even though two-thirds of its economy depends on coal.
The city of Zhangjiakou, one of the three Olympic venues, has installed wind farms on hundreds of hectares to produce 14 million kilowatts of electricity, similar to the energy that Singapore produces.
Authorities have also covered mountain slopes with solar panels, with which they hope to generate another seven million kilowatts.
The Beijing Games organizing committee told AFP that China has built a “plant that takes energy generated from renewable sources, stores it and transmits it to all venues.”
He indicated that this should ensure an uninterrupted power supply.
But China’s rapid growth has been dependent on coal-fired power for decades, and the country has struggled to break free from its reliance on this polluting fuel.
Beijing is building more coal-fired power plants than the rest of the world combined, a plan that threatens to undermine its decarbonization goals and the global effort to tackle climate change.
Will pollution affect the Games? In a bid to clean up pollution from Beijing’s skies ahead of the Games, coal stoves in 25 million homes in northern China were replaced by gas or electricity last year.
Tens of thousands of factories were fined for exceeding emission limits.
Steel mills around Beijing were forced to cut their output in half.
The number of heavily polluted days in the city has dropped to 10 in 2020 from 43 in 2015 according to the Ministry of Environment, although Beijing’s air quality typically exceeds World Health Organization parameters.
A 2015 Greenpeace review concluded that “the big lesson of the 2008 Olympics (in Beijing) was to understand that moving polluting industries from Beijing to neighboring provinces does not improve air quality.”
And the transport? About 655 hydrogen buses will be used to transport athletes and officials during the Winter Games, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
Organizers highlighted that 85% of vehicles used at the Games will use electricity or hydrogen to reduce pollution.
As only local spectators will be able to watch the Games due to the pandemic, the emissions caused by the flights will be much lower than average.
The coronavirus pandemic has also dramatically reduced the number of international flights to China.
Where will the snow come from? Outdoor events in the Zhangjiakou and Yanqing Mountains north of Beijing will rely entirely on artificial snow.
Artificial snow has been used to varying degrees since the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, USA.
China estimates it will need about 185 million liters of water to produce the snow needed for events like skiing and snowboarding, according to a 2019 forecast by the country’s planning office.
The water would come from giant reservoirs in Zhanjiakou, “but it will represent less than 1% of the city’s water supply,” Zhang Li, a member of the Games organizing committee, told the state-run Global Times newspaper.
Snowmakers said that the water used to make snow does not contain “chemical additives” and that when it melts, the water will naturally return to the ground.
Are Winter Games Viable? The city of Beijing suffers from a lack of water, with just 185 cubic meters of liquid per person each year for its 21 million people.
That’s less than a fifth of what is needed by UN standards.
Since Beijing was chosen to host the Games, the local government has started a construction frenzy.
Data from the national sports administration indicates that China now has 654 ice rinks, three times more than in 2015, and the government plans to build another 400.
But environmentalists warn that promoting winter sports that rely on artificial ice and snow could exacerbate water shortages in places with limited supplies.
Carmen de Jong, a geographer at the University of Strasbourg, said that “playing games in a place or region without snow is unsustainable because it is water and energy intensive, damages the soil and causes erosion.”
“Creating events without the core resource you depend on is not only unsustainable, it’s irresponsible,” he insists.
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