By Vivian Yeo
Wednesday, August 06 2008 04:53 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/business/0,39044229,62044565,00.htm

Red may be the dominant--and auspicious--color for this year's Beijing 2008 Olympic Games held in China, but green could very well determine the country's performance as host.

"Green Olympics" is one of the three concepts that the BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad) have adopted for this year's Games. The other two being "High-tech Olympics" and "People's Olympics".

Environmental friendliness is not a new theme at the Olympics--Australia, for instance, focused on responsible waste management and water recycling during the Sydney Games in 2000.

What was interesting, however, was the attention paid by the Chinese organizers at a fairly early stage of green awareness, according to Bob Hayward, a former ICT advisor to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG).

The BOCOG and IT team for the Beijing Olympics were focused on environmental issues as early as 2001 or 2002, before sustainability commanded global attention, Hayward pointed out. "Our discussions in those early days were very much about how IT could play a role in reducing the environmental impact of the games, by things such as high-bandwidth [networks] reducing the need for travel, smart logistics systems to handle the movement of materials and equipment into and out of Beijing, and for smart building management systems to be embedded into the designs of all the new facilities being constructed.

The BOCOG and IT team for the Beijing Olympics were focused on environmental issues as early as 2001 or 2002, before sustainability commanded global attention.

Bob Hayward, former ICT advisor to BOCOG

"There was not a lot of conversation at that time on reducing the impact of IT systems themselves--through things like virtualization or thin client [computing]--since those were very nascent concepts in 2001/02…in relation to the reduction of energy consumption," added Hayward, who is now the director of risk advisory services at KPMG.

At a media briefing in Beijing earlier this year, a BOCOG spokesperson noted that the city government had since 1998 taken a lot of measures to try to be a cleaner city. Beijing is notorious for high air pollution levels.

Gu Yaoming, who formerly served as a BOCOG executive member and secretary-general of the Chinese Olympic Committee, said measures to improve air quality included moving factories to other provinces, introducing the Euro IV standard for cleaner motor fuel and planting trees in what was known as the "great green wall". Beijing, he added, also intends to impose strict rules to control traffic during the Games period, with private cars "encouraged to remain home".

Measures are also taken to ensure IT contributes to a greener Olympics, Jeremy Hore, chief integrator of Beijing 2008 at Atos Origin, said at a briefing in March.

From an architectural point of view, Atos worked with hardware provider Lenovo to "bring the equipment down to a bare minimum" to bring about reduction in power consumption, he said. Data center equipment were also specially configured to achieve energy efficiency.

In addition, enabling remote access to the Commentator Information System meant that broadcasters can obtain real-time results and data feeds in their country of operation, instead of at the Olympic venues. This could result in fewer travelers, Hore pointed out.