EE on Environmental Systems and Societies

[arv1996]

HELP!

Hi, I'm doing my Extended Essay about the environmental impact of the Olympic Games. I have been looking for information about Beijing, which is the most popular green games and I have found a lot of useful statistics that I can analyze in my EE. I talked with my school adviser and she told me that it would be better to compare/contrast two olympic games, for example Beijing 2008 and London 2012, because if I do it about one olympic games, it would be descriptive and I would get a D or C maximum. However, I haven't found enough information about other games. For Beijing I found a greenpeace 50-pages article and many other articles and reports made by reliable sources. For London 2012 I only found news and small articles of online newspapers and blogs. For Sydney 2000 I have found more info than London, but in comparison with Beijing's reports, the info about Sydney 2000 is very poor and insuficient to analyze.

I want to focus on the use of renewable energies because I think that it could be related to other ESS topics such as greenhouse gases, sustainability, natural resources, etc, so....my possible research question could be the following: To what extent the Olympic Games have promoted the use of renewable energies in London and Beijing?

It could be London or another host city, I don't know yet because I haven't found enough information and I really don't know how to look for more statistics in relation to renewable energies promoted with this mega sport event.

Another teacher told me that I was losing my time looking for information about other olympic games because it would be easier to analyze deeply only Beijing 2008....so my research question could be the same one but without the mentioning of another games.

What do you recommend me? I don't have a lot of time to decide and if I decide to do it about 2 olympic games, I would have to do a deep research again about London or Sydney, because both are kind of popular in comparison with Athens and other past games.

Do you think that renewable energies is a good ESS topic to analyse, knowing that I would have to relate this with a sport event?

[PCM HL]

I actually think it is a really good topic and I would stick with it to finish my EE on it. I live in India and I found information about my EE from the national university here so my advice to you would be that don't just use the Internet as the only source of information. If I remember correctly there was an Olympic held in Mexico (u'r host country) in 1968 so you could find a lot of information about all the renewable energies from the nearby universities or libraries. Also I feel you will find more contrasting information since the time difference is huge between the Olympic games held in Beijing and the one held in Mexico. So your research question could be:

To what extent have the use of renewable energies been promoted in the Olympic Games held in Mexico in 1968 as compared to the Olympic Games held in Beijing in 2008?

Hope this helps