The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will have 355,000 trees planted in Mali and Senegal to participate in the fight against desertification in the Sahel and keep its commitments in the fight against global warming, he said on Thursday (June 17th).
The IOC announced in May its intention to create a “Olympic forest”. He provided details in a statement: 355,000 trees of local species, planted in about 90 villages in Mali and Senegal and representing an area of 2,120 hectares.
After a period of preparation and cultivation in nurseries, planting should take place in the second and third quarters of 2022, in collaboration with Tree Aid, an organization committed to Africa against poverty and the climate crisis, says the IOC.
This project will be part of the Great Green Wall, an initiative launched in 2007 by the African Union in the face of the advancing desert. It is about creating a natural strip of 8000 km which would cross Africa from west to east and would restore the lands on which millions of people could live, in one of the poorest regions of the world which also knows one of the fastest rising temperatures.
The announced objective of restoring 100 million hectares of degraded land by 2030 is however still very distant.
Environmental impact
The forest “Will also help the IOC to become an organization making a positive contribution to the climate by 2024”, that is to say to eliminate from the atmosphere more carbon than it emits, explains its president, Thomas Bach, quoted in the press release, published concomitantly with the World Day to Combat Desertification and drought.
The “Olympic forest” is supposed to absorb 200,000 tonnes of CO equivalent2, therefore more than the projected emissions of the IOC between 2021 and 2024, said the press release. This equates to 32,000 Geneva-Tokyo round-trip flights, he said.
The IOC, questioned by AFP, did not specify Thursday evening which IOC activities were taken into account in this calculation.
The IOC proclaims the fight against global warming as one of its priorities, while with their huge construction sites, their long-distance flights and their mountains of waste, major sporting events have an environmental impact that is all the more decried because they do not fall under core activities.
The IOC announced in March that all Olympic Games should show a negative carbon footprint from 2030.