It’s one thing to aspire to be the “greenest games in history”, quite another to achieve it. While the Paris Olympics are responding to the threat to sport from the climate crisis, they also highlight the contradictions inherent in making global sport a platform for climate action.
Average temperatures in Paris are set to be 2.4–2.7°C higher than in 1924 when the city last hosted the games. Although the possibility of an extreme heatwave worried organisers, so far they’ve mostly contended with soggy skies and flood warnings.
