Timber venues, river swimming and re-use: how the Paris Olympics is going green – and what it’s missing

A temporary stadium in the Champ-de-Mars, Paris Ekaterina Pokrovsky/Shutterstock

As Paris prepares to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the sustainability of the event is coming under scrutiny.

The organisers have promoted Paris 2024 as the greenest Olympics ever, aiming to halve the carbon emissions of previous Olympics. They have drastically cut back on building new stadiums and venues, and have relied heavily on wood as a building material for new infrastructure and used low-carbon concrete. This approach has another benefit: it’s cheaper.