“The Olympic Village air conditioning debacle is a perfect example of the barriers to climate action”

The row over air conditioning in the athletes’ village at the Paris 2024 Olympics highlights the scale of the challenge we face in adopting sustainable building technologies, writes Smith Mordak in our Olympic Impact series.

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The air conditioning debacle in the Olympic Village in Paris is a perfect example of the barriers to climate action.

If you haven’t heard, the athletes’ village is essentially designed and built to be cooled by a geothermal cooling system that pumps water from 50-70 meters below the surface to keep the athletes cool, as long as they follow a few simple rules, like keeping the blinds closed during the day. The system is similar to the district cooling network that keeps buildings and landmarks across Paris cool, even during severe heat waves.

This story plays out every day

Unfortunately, confidence in this technology wavered and many teams, including teams from the UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada and the US, decided to purchase mobile air conditioning units to supplement the geothermal cooling.

This was met with dismay, as it tipped the playing field in favour of competitors from the richer countries. Those countries that had the budget to buy the extra air conditioning units were able to benefit from energy-efficient active cooling, while those that did not had to deal with higher temperatures.

The Olympics are an extraordinary event, but this story plays out every day. It is the epitome of climate inaction: a low-emissions solution is proposed (or even implemented); fear that it might cause inconvenience or discomfort takes hold; those with the means to opt for a high-emissions, business-as-usual solution choose not to take the risk; greenhouse gases are emitted and inequality reigns. How do we break this cycle?

To answer this question, I think we need to solve two underlying problems. How do we build trust in low- and zero-emission technologies? And how do we create the cultural conditions that allow us to act for each other, in solidarity?

The Paris Athletes Village cooling system has all the hallmarks of so many low-carbon technologies struggling to catch on. It’s proven at scale, it’s marketed as state-of-the-art, but in reality it has a long and proud history (the wealthiest citizens of the Roman Empire used running cold water to cool their buildings 2,000 years ago) and it requires modest behavioural changes to make it work. We have so many of the solutions we need!

But whether we’re talking about domestic heat pumps or timber construction or nature-based flood management solutions, the same kind of evidence is there in their favor, and yet faith falters. “Technology will save us,” they cry, and yet the technology is questioned and ridiculed whenever it’s in plain sight. Meanwhile, everyone wants the latest smartphone, why?

Everything that has to do with sustainability conjures up an association of gloom and misery

Here’s my theory: The latest smartphone has two qualities that these very sensible sustainable building solutions don’t have: trust in the brand and not being too closely associated with sustainability.

Building trust in a brand is a big job that takes a lot of time and effort, usually over a long period of time. The geothermal cooling system at the Olympic Village in Paris has no brand trust. A survey found that more than 70 percent of people think organizers should take extra measures to protect athletes.

Anything that has to do with sustainability has an even bigger mountain to climb, because it comes with a gloomy, hair-shirt association. For decades, we have been hearing the bad news: climate change is coming and we will soon have to give up our comfortable lifestyle and go back to the Middle Ages.

When a solution is advertised as sustainable, it gets an ugly color. And no matter how hard marketers try to convince us, deep down we suspect that anything environmentally friendly is a compromise and we don’t trust it.

Trust is a big issue on all fronts. For example, trust in American and British institutions is low and declining. If we want to tackle climate change, we need to learn to rebuild trust in each other.

As anyone who has ever tried to repair a relationship knows, it is very difficult. But as anyone who has ever built truly deep and lasting trust knows, it is more than worth it.

A major barrier we have to overcome is accepting that this is work we have to do, even though we shouldn’t have to do it.

The second challenge, creating cultural conditions that allow us to act not in self-defense but in solidarity with each other, is also no easy task.

For clues to this, I increasingly look to ways of healing from intergenerational trauma – particularly Steffi Bednarek, who is brilliant at this. The transmission of trauma from one generation to the next plays out in all sorts of ways, and I would argue that climate change is one of them. Generation after generation has fought for their own safety, and in the face of fear and scarcity, they have made short-term decisions that entrench unsustainable behaviors and systems, and drive a wedge between humans and the rest of nature.

Then each subsequent generation inherits that fear and scarcity, and the perceived scarcity that comes from not being able to distribute resources fairly, and so the cycle continues.

But there is hope! If the new parent – ​​who finds themselves boiling over with anger when their child screams all night long, but decides that instead of taking that anger out on their child or their spouse or others, they will process that anger and not repeat the pattern of their parent and their parent before them – breaks the cycle, so that our generation (by which I mean everyone alive now) can choose not to continue the cycle of climate decay.

In addressing intergenerational trauma, a major barrier to overcome is accepting that this is work we have to do, even though we shouldn’t have to. It’s not fair, but it’s been handed to us and we can choose to deal with it or pass it on.

I think a similar acceptance is needed in the face of climate change. Those of us who enjoy the privileges of a life made comfortable and easy by the spoils of the industrial revolution are the lucky ones: because we have the privilege of making this choice.

If we achieve the goal of a fair civilization, we can collectively decide what to prioritize

We can choose to just pass it on, to buy our air conditioners and let those with less resources in this generation and the next do it. That is even less fair. None of this is fair, but that is even worse.

Now you might think that I’m perpetuating the idea that addressing climate change is a compromise that ideally could be avoided. Maybe that’s true in some cases, but generally speaking, if we’re going to achieve the goal of a fair civilization that we can actually sustain on this planet indefinitely, and we can trust each other enough, then we can collectively decide what to prioritize.

So a society in balance with natural cycles and not systematically keeping the wound of inequality open might decide that it is a fair and sensible decision to spend one month more (renewable, of course) on cooling every four years to support ALL Olympic athletes.

Smith Mordak is an architect, writer, curator and chief executive of the UK Green Building Council.

The photo is by Stefan Tuchila.

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Olympic impact

This article is part of Dezeen’s Olympic Impact series, which examines the sustainability measures being taken by the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and whether major sporting events that respond to the climate challenge are possible.