With plans for athletes to swim in the River Seine in the heart of Paris, Olympic organizers have essentially bet against the extreme weather of climate change. For several days, it looked like they were going to lose – abandoning the swimming portion of the triathlon races.
It wasn’t until Wednesday morning, after the men’s race was postponed for a day and test events cancelled, that organizers announced that the latest tests showed the water met standards to allow swimming.
Some scientists and engineers said the organizers were taking a big gamble at a time when Heavy rain increased with human-caused climate change, especially in Europe. Rain escapes the urban environment and contributes to higher levels of bacteria in the city’s famous river.
“They just gambled, flipped the coin and hoped for a dry season and this ended up being the wettest in the last 30 years,” said Metin Duran, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Villanova University who has researched stormwater management.
Organizers “worked through most scenarios related to hacking and physical threats without fully evaluating the implications of climate-related extreme events,” said University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs, who directs the Center for Adaptation Science and Solutions. Climate. “It’s definitely time to take climate threats seriously.”
If any city can be expected to be attentive to the challenges of climate change, it is Paris. It’s where the most significant climate agreement in history was reached almost a decade ago — try to limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. And the Paris games aim to have half the carbon footprint of previous games held in London and Rio de Janeiro.
Paris, like many older cities around the world, has a combined sewer system, meaning the city’s wastewater and stormwater flow through the same pipes. With periods of heavy or prolonged rain, pipe capacity is reached, sending raw wastewater to the river instead of to a treatment plant.
Paris spent 1.4 billion euros ($1.5 billion) to improve water quality in the Seine, including building a giant basin to capture excess rainwater and prevent wastewater from entering the Seine. river, the renovation of sewage infrastructure and the modernization of wastewater treatment plants.
But persistent rain, which dampened the opening ceremonies and temporarily gave way to a heat warning on Tuesday, worked against that. Tuesday Men’s Triathlon It was postponed for Wednesday. The city has had at least 80 rainy days in Paris this year, about two and a half weeks more than normal, according to the French meteorological office.
An AP analysis of weather data found that Paris in 2024 had the second highest number of rainy days since 1950, surpassed only by 2016. There was just a week-long dry spell this year to give the drainage system a break. There are usually at least three at this point, the AP analysis shows.
“Heavy summer rain has always been a possibility, and with a warmer climate these heavy rain events have only become more intense, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “So that would definitely need to be included in the planning.”
A study last week in Science magazine found a notable global increase in the variability — the all-or-nothing quality — of rain and snow over the past 100 years, with a big jump starting in 1960. The researchers then did standard climate attribution analysis to compare what actually happened. with what would happen. were expected in a fictional world without human-caused climate change. They found that this increase in heavy rainfall punctuated by longer dry spells bore hallmarks of global warming.
The study also found that three areas – Europe, eastern North America and Australia – saw much larger jumps in precipitation extremes.
The laws of physics dictate that warmer air holds more moisture, which turns into heavier rainfall, while climate change alters weather patterns, making them more trapped in torrential downpours or cloudless sunny days, said co-author of the study Peili Wu, climate scientist. at the UK Meteorological Office.
Organizers said what happened was beyond their control. Aurélie Merle, Paris 2024 sports director, noted to reporters on Tuesday that previous triathlon competitions have sometimes been reduced to duathlons. This was before the announcement on Wednesday that Seine swimming would go ahead.
Duran, the Villanova professor, noted that the acceptable pollution level for triathlon is nearly four times lower than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s level for swimmable waterways. Mayor of Paris did a public swimming show on the river earlier this month, something Duran called a publicity stunt. He said he would not swim in the Seine.
He called underground storage basins “the last thing any stormwater expert would suggest as a solution,” Duran said. Few cities still use this solution because it is limited and easily overwhelmed by the more intense and frequent rains caused by climate change. It’s a solution for the era before strong global warming, he said.
Future Olympic sites need to take into account a wetter world, said Villanova’s Duran: “The sewage overflow problem is bound to get worse until climate change is addressed.”
Los Angeles, host city of the 2028 games, could learn a lesson and work towards more green spaces and fewer private vehicles, said Imperial College’s Otto.
“The Olympic Games are a great opportunity to change cities, because for some reason people accept that athletes need a healthy environment, while ordinary citizens must live in the middle of pollution, traffic, noise and risk their lives and health”, said Otto.
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