The warm afterglow of the Paris Olympics, now getting a pep up with the Paralympics, provides a great opportunity to look to the Brisbane Olympics in 2032. We can ask: can Australia improve on the high bar of Sydney’s famous “Green Games” in 2000?
The countdown to the Brisbane Olympics in 2032 has ticked under eight years, and already, “Will they be ready?” pressure has started to be felt.
More importantly, there should be mounting pressure on the Brisbane organisers to come up with a “big something”, or perhaps more intriguingly, “a big swarm of little somethings”, to make their Olympics genuinely significant for a planet in strife.
That will require deep relevance for its times and a real legacy, as well as a great spectacle, to achieve the elusive tag of the “greatest Games ever”.
The early intentions for Brisbane 2032 have a lot of vague and non-binding PR language, with occasional specifics and a very real risk of underachievement.
Amid a fast-evolving renewable energy transformation, with the increasingly terrifying lived experience of the worsening climate crisis, it may all end up rather ho-hum, if not irresponsibly underdone, well before the cauldron is even lit.
As yet, it’s too far out to definitively call greenwashing on Brisbane 2032, but it’s exactly the right time to raise some questions.
Exhibit A for this pre-emptive allegation of a low bar approach comes in the form of Brisbane’s biggest sustainability boast, which is that:
Brisbane 2032 is committed to strong climate action that aims to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than the Games emits. Our focus will be on minimising direct and indirect Games-related carbon emissions and encouraging everyone involved to act.
First, you could drive the proverbial Mack truck through the looseness of the language in this “commitment”.
Second, this will be more of a compliance goal rather than a leadership one because it’s now a formal requirement of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that all Games held after 2030 will be “carbon positive”.
Brisbane is just the first to which this new high bar applies.
Third, by 2032, the electricity grid in Australia is expected to be at least 80-90 per cent supported by renewable generation, without the Brisbane 2032 organisers having to lift a finger. For energy, at least, they’ll be able to step over a bar that’s being dropped to knee height.
Of course, the “indirect emissions” from tens if not hundreds of thousands of athletes, trainers, officials and spectators flying into Brisbane from around the world and across Australia will remain a major challenge. Hopefully not one they’ll be addressing with questionable offsets!
Also, by 2032, and depending on election results between now and then, Australia may well have passed the 50 per cent mark for achieving net zero by 2050, against a 2005 baseline, and we’ll aim to be somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way by 2035.
Don’t get me wrong. Demonstrating net zero, or even real zero plus a bit more, at such a high-profile global event in 2032 is a good thing in isolation.
But think about the scenario. How many more coral bleaching events will smash the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs around the world over the next eight years? How many turbo-charged storms and cyclones? How many extreme-heat-driven droughts? How many catastrophically intense bushfires/wildfires?
Brisbane will need to be about overtly normalising and operationalising solutions, not just showcasing them, and thus should be expected to embrace and embed the vital trends of the times: circularity, electrification, decarbonisation and nature-positive, and that’s before we get to social values, among which Indigenous rights will need to be front and centre, alongside wider community participation that extends to the regions.
Inevitably, comparisons will be made with Sydney, which had the head start of hosting a landmark “Millennium Games” in 2000. Sydney forged the concept of a “Green Games”, inspiring the IOC to embrace sustainability as a core pillar of all the Games that have followed.
The world, however, was a very different place back then.
For example, outside of a relatively small group of insiders, who really remembers how an early commitment to the then new and poorly defined concept of sustainability and an unlikely collaboration with environmental activist super group Greenpeace helped win the 2000 Olympics for Sydney?
Unlike now, back then, the contest to host an Olympics was intense, and Sydney 2000 was a surprise winner from a highly competitive field of seven cities, including the emerging economic and diplomatic might of Beijing at a time when the world was embracing China’s rise.
It’s Greenpeace that claims gold for first coming up with the idea of the “Green Games” in 1992, the same year as the famous Rio Earth Summit, which elevated environmental sustainability, or sustainable development as industry preferred to call it, into the global political mainstream.
A year later, in 1993, Sydney 2000 went on to win the bidding contest, and subsequently, Greenpeace also secretly backed a winning bid for the Olympic village development, which included a visionary “solar village” to house the athletes (a forerunner to Australia’s global leadership in rooftop solar!)
For Greenpeace, the unprecedented exercise was simultaneously one of its boldest and most controversial strategies of all time.
For the Games organisers, working with an organisation as feisty as Greenpeace was never going to be easy, as Greenpeace itself made clear in its own post-event environmental report, How green the Games? which said:
While Greenpeace has worked closely with the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), the Olympic Coordination Authority (OCA) and other Olympic and city officials responsible for the Games, we remain independent. We have praised Sydney’s efforts when they have led to some of the most progressive environmental work internationally and protested when efforts have fallen short of promises or possibilities. For Greenpeace, the Sydney Olympic Games have provided a platform to implement effective, mainstream environmental solutions. Since 1992, when we first came up with the idea for a Green Games, much has been achieved. Yet much more could have been done to see Sydney’s original green vision become reality
Nonetheless, Sydney 2000 went on to write sustainability into the guidelines for the whole Olympics movement, and since then, every game has had to be “green” in some meaningful way.
That was game changing.
It’s very unlikely the Queenslanders will be letting Greenpeace or its ilk anywhere near the decision-making for their Games. Hopefully, however, they will collaborate with many communities based and non-government organisations and solutions-focused businesses to deliver an authentic 2032 successor to Sydney’s breakthrough achievement.
So the question remains: What can Brisbane 2032 do to mark its place in a truly sustainable and stand-out way?