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The organizers of the Paris Olympic Games have outdone their predecessors in trying to make the Games the most sustainable in the decades since climate change became a concern. But with an estimated 11 million tourists converging on the City of Light for the Olympics, including 1.5 million from abroad, the Games can only be so green.On the plus side, organizers have been serious in their efforts to reduce carbon emissions. They measured the expected carbon footprint of the Games, reduced emissions through energy efficiencies, limited new construction by using existing facilities, added bike lanes, minimized the use of fuel-powered generators and sourced sustainably produced goods for medals and podiums and much of the event materials.Perhaps most important, they’ve talked about their sustainability work at every turn, drawing attention to unsexy details and raising public awareness of environmental issues such as air pollution and extreme heat in France and beyond.Still, international travel is a big contributor to the overall carbon impact of the Games. Organizers of the Rio Olympics in 2016 predicted that slightly more than half of the carbon emissions would come from spectators. Of that amount, 80 percent was expected to be generated by international fans traveling to and from the Games. Organizers saw a low potential to reduce those emissions and said they would need to compensate elsewhere in the preparation and running of the events.What else is to be done? If the world is serious about reducing carbon emissions, the Olympics, like so much else, will have to change even more. Jules Boykoff, who has written extensively about the Olympic Games, rightly argues in Scientific American that “the Games need to reduce their size, limit the number of tourists who travel from afar, thoroughly greenify their capacious supply chains and open up their eco-books for bona fide accountability.”The sustainability efforts in Paris have not all been smooth sailing. The Seine is scheduled to host marathon swimming and the swim portion of the triathlon. But despite spending 1.4 billion euros trying to clean the river, French authorities have achieved inconsistent results: Water tests in June still showed high levels of E. coli. Those numbers improved and crept into the range of safe to swim in late June and early this month. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, recently took a swim in the river after canceling an earlier planned plunge because of those high bacteria levels. Her swim was promising, but one heavy rainfall could draw more pollutants into the river and undo much of the progress she celebrated.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Organizers must reduce the event’s carbon footprint.