“It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you,” award-winning author Jodi Picoult had once said. This could not be further from the truth for air pollution, which is one of the least visible but most harmful types of pollution. Not only are key pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter highly toxic (Bonsu et al., 2020), they are also widely embedded in modern life.
Air pollution is omnipresent in various aspects of urban lifestyles, particularly transport (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2014)
It is thus unsurprising that the Olympic Games — being a mega event involving the large-scale consolidation of urban activity from transportation to construction — significantly generates air pollution. While exact statistics remain uncertain as mentioned previously, the presence of smoggy skies and high respiratory infection rates suggest that air pollution at the Olympic Games is a clear cause for concern. It is hence instrumental to identify the biggest underlying triggers, so that authorities can work towards mitigating their impacts.
One of such triggers is transport, which facilitates the movement of those involved in the Olympic Games at different spatial scales. At the global scale, air transport is used to transport athletes and spectators from their home countries to the host city. While this transport mode is efficient given its relatively high speed and load capacity, enabling the large-scale transnational movement of people, it is also highly pollutive. Commercial aircraft emit significant amounts of nitrogen dioxide when flying in the free troposphere, forming the greenhouse gas ozone which traps outgoing solar radiation at the ground level (Colvile et al., 2001). Carbon dioxide, a pollutant which is produced during fuel combustion for aircraft engines, exacerbates such warming by absorbing outgoing infrared radiation (Colvile et al., 2001). While air travel at the Olympic Games only generates 65000 tons of carbon dioxide, constituting barely one month’s worth of emissions from a coal plant (Jacobo, 2021), its environmental and health-related impacts remain worrying as these pollutants have long residence times.
The emission of nitrogen dioxide by aeroplanes in the free troposphere exacerbates the greenhouse effect (Hotten, 2019)
Land transport at the city scale is equally, if not more, pollutive. During the Olympic Games, road traffic is remarkably high, not only because of the need for vehicles to transport athletes and staff to Olympic venues, but also the surge in tourists travelling there. This produces substantial vehicle emissions which not only contain radiation-trapping ozone, but also particulate matter that jeopardises air quality and causes respiratory illnesses when overly inhaled (He, Fan and Zhou, 2016).
It is hence crucial to be mindful of the significant role that transport plays in causing air pollution at the Olympic Games — only then can we foresee air pollution and its associated impacts, and take mitigation measures. Otherwise, we will be literally and figuratively steering towards environmental disaster.
References
Bonsu, N. O., Pope, F., Ababio, M. O., Appoh, E., Ashinyo, M. E., Essuman, S. N., Donkor, L. CS., & Thomson, I. (2020). How Coronavirus (COVID-19) has made the invisible silent killer of air pollution visible: lessons for building resilient communities. Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research, 28(1), 21219-21220. https://doi.org/10.26717/bjstr.2020.28.004587
Colvile, R. N., Hutchinson, E. J., Mindell, J. S., & Warren, R. F. (2001). The transport sector as a source of air pollution. Atmospheric environment, 35(9), 1537-1565. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1352-2310(00)00551-3
He, G., Fan, M., & Zhou, M. (2016). The effect of air pollution on mortality in China: Evidence from the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies Working Paper No. 2015-03. Available at: https://iems.ust.hk/publications/iems-working-papers/guojun-he-effect-air-pollution-mortality-china-olympic
Hotten, R. (2019). Could aviation ever be less polluting? [Online image]. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48185337
Jacobo, J. (2021, August 2). How the Tokyo Olympics could affect climate change. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/International/tokyo-olympics-ban-spectators-affect-environment/story?id=78151177
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2014). The Cost of Air Pollution [Online image]. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. https://www.oecd.org/env/the-cost-of-air-pollution-9789264210448-en.htm