Editor's note: The translators KUANG Haoxuan and WANG Zhuoran are students of School of Foreign Languages and Literature of Beijing Normal University.

Beijing, the first city in the Olympic history to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Games, is also becoming the first to host a carbon-neutral Olympics.

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is demonstrating new technologies and trends that has caught global attention in areas of energy conservation, environmental protection and sustainable development. “From natural carbon dioxide refrigeration at ice rinks to 100% renewables-powered venues, China is striving to run a ‘green’ Olympics to showcase its leadership in climate-friendly tech,” wrote Reuters.

China has pledged to strive for a carbon emission peak by 2030, an agenda where the 2022 Games would serve as a crucial part. Upholding the idea of delivering a “Green Games”, China has made significant investments in areas such as renewable energy. “(The Chinese) want sustainability to be the heart of how they prepare and host the Games,” said Marie Sallois, Director of Corporate and Sustainable Development at the International Olympics Committee.

In 2012, the London Summer Olympics created the first certifiable international Sustainability Management System standard. The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics also managed to leverage innovative technologies to reduce the carbon emission of the event. However, the winter Olympics is more complicated, because ice and snow sports have a higher demand for energy. The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is implementing a series of proactive measures with innovative technologies in electricity, buildings, transportation, and more to eliminate the Games’ carbon footprint, according to CleanTechnica, a U.S. website that focuses on topics such as clean energy and green transport.

Zhangjiakou, the co-host city of the 2022 Winter Olympics, is a national-level demonstration zone for renewable energy. Before the opening of the Games, an advanced flexible direct current (VSC HVDC) transmission line connecting Zhangjiakou and Beijing has been in operation, allowing the wind and solar power in Zhangjiakou to be delivered to 25 venues across the three competition zones. The new transmission line, which has the highest voltage level and the largest transmission capacity among all VSC HVDC projects around the world, adopts several of the world’s leading technologies, as per CleanTechnica.

In terms of infrastructure construction, both the newly built venues and those that have been used since the 2008 Summer Olympics have widely adopted energy-saving and environmentally friendly technologies, including low-carbon building materials and smart snowmaking equipment. And for the first time at this sport event, China is using CO₂ collected from industrial waste gases to cool ice rinks in its four ice sports venues, replacing traditional hydrofluorocarbons that can damage the ozone layer. “With the CO₂ refrigeration process, we can save 20-30% on electricity compared to traditional ice making methods,” said Wu Xiaonan, head of the National Speed Skating Stadium, quoted by Reuters.

Green transport is also a highlight of this carbon-neutral Olympics. China is the world's largest hydrogen producer, and has been striving to make technology breakthroughs in storage and transporting the clean energy, according to Reuters. During this year’s Games, the organizer has put more than 800 hydrogen-fueled vehicles for the sustainable Olympic transportation. Moreover, as noted on Nature’s website, China’s strict COVID-19 restrictions have helped reduce the intensity of transportation associated with the Games. And at the same time, China has planted some 60 million trees, and deployed hydrogen-fueled, natural gas and pure-electric vehicles in all the competition zones to offset some of the unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions.

Beijing’s Winter Games is the first to have considered “sustainability” from the earliest stages of preparation, and the practice should be encouraged in future games, said Marie Sallois in an interview. Michael Davidson, an energy systems researcher at the University of California San Diego, told Nature that the biggest value of the Games is “in demonstrating that broader carbon-neutral activities are possible”. And he added that these renewable resources might have been developed even if the Games had not been happening in China.

Researchers in various countries believe that sustainability is becoming increasingly important to the Olympics Movement in the future, which is strongly linked to external factors such as climate change. Daniel Scott, a geographer at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, cautions that making the Winter Games even greener is especially crucial given the existential threat posed by a warming world. By the end of the century, changes in temperature and snow conditions would mean that the majority of cities that have hosted any of the past Winter Olympic Games would be hard to host another. And this means that the IOC will need to be “even more creative and flexible in how they host” future games, he said.

Starting from Beijing 2022, the future Olympic Games will face more challenges head-on in a continuously changing natural environment.

Source: China Youth Daily (February 09, 2022 Page 06)

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