Only locals should be allowed to attend the Olympics

The presence of the 2 million or so fans who will travel from abroad to attend the 2024 Paris Olympic Games will be felt in the city’s stadiums. Unfortunately, it will also be felt by the climate.

According to Olympic organizers, around one-quarter of the carbon emissions associated with holding the world’s biggest sporting event will be generated by spectator travel.

It is a longstanding problem that did not originate with the Paris Olympics. But the Paris Games, like previous ones, have embraced sustainability as a core principle. Along the way, it has made good progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions related to venue construction and operations. But it has done little to address overseas spectator emissions.

There is an attainable, if radical, solution that would make future Games far more enjoyable and accessible: Keep it local. Limit most ticket sales to residents of the host city and surrounding areas, while providing some access to regional fans who travel most sustainably.

The argument for taking action is clear. At the 2012 London Summer Games, spectator-related emissions, most of which were air travel-related, clocked in at 913,000 metric tons of carbon, or 28% of the 3.3 million tons emitted during the event (that is equivalent to the annual emissions of about 696,000 typical American cars).

Four years later, the organizers of the 2016 Rio Olympics estimated that overseas spectator travel would generate a massive 1.72 million metric tons, or 38% of the total emissions (but final numbers were never released).

While it would no doubt be scary for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to take on travel-generated emissions, the organization does have a real-life example of the impact it could create: Tokyo 2020.

As you will recall, those Summer Games were delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizers, desperate to limit viral transmission, ordered a 70% reduction in overseas personnel allowed to travel to Tokyo. According to a post-Games analysis, that reduction (not including athletes) cut associated air travel-generated carbon dioxide by nearly 79% — from 165,051 metric tons to 35,365 metric tons. Meanwhile, overall carbon savings from prohibiting most spectators totaled 800,000 metric tons, according to the IOC.

In 2021, a widely cited Nature study on Olympic sustainability argued that downsizing the Games would reduce the attendance — and environmental impacts — of spectators. It is a good idea, but dialing back the size of the Games would mean penalizing the athletes whose events would be eliminated and reducing the overall importance of the Olympics on the world stage.

Switching to a model of regional attendance would avoid such sticking points, while also creating some important benefits, chief among them an engaged local fan base who would lend the event a true flavor of their home country. Games populated almost entirely by foreign tourists have long been a thorn in the side of locals. In Paris, for example, opposition to the Olympics has been significant, driven in part by frustration over the traffic and price gouging that comes with the influx of visitors.

A sporting event expressly designed to entertain locals should erode some of that opposition and perhaps expand the number of cities willing to host the Games.

In addition to residents of the host city, tickets could be made available to regional fans who can reach the Games via rail. For Paris, that would expand the ticket pool to the whole of France and many other European countries. Fans who can only reach the event via air travel should have their access severely limited and be subject to environmental surcharges (to offset their impacts).

Yes, doing so would limit overseas attendees to the wealthy. But realistically, the steep cost of attending a distant Olympics is already cost-prohibitive for most people.

The most determined fans would likely find and buy tickets on the secondary markets. But on-site authentication would dissuade all but the biggest risk takers from showing up at the airport. It is certainly doable on a technical level. For example, professional teams in the United States occasionally impose geographic restrictions on ticket sales when they want locals — not hostile visiting fans — cheering on the home team.

Of course, there will still be Olympic discontents, starting with airlines and hotels that hope to profit from tourist traffic. But those profits might not be quite as important as they think. Economists studying hotel occupancies around mega sporting events find that the latter often simply displace other tourists, who travel elsewhere rather than dealing with the Games influx.

Paris appears to be the latest example. Recently, Air France-KLM projected a 14.8% drop in foreign arrivals to the city during July compared with last year. The airline blames the Olympics.

That is an accidental win for the climate and for Parisians. To keep the streak going, the Games need to think like a local.