Closed-Loop Environmental Governance for Carbon-Neutral Mega-Events: Institutional Design, Policy Tools, MRV, and Environmental Legacy of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:This paper offers a rigorous methodology for evaluating carbon neutrality claims in large events, using MRV and benchmarking to avoid over-attribution.

🏢実務担当者:Event organizers can learn from the MRV-centered governance chain and the importance of quality offsets and transparent disclosure.

🏛政策担当者:Regulators can consider the closed-loop governance model for ensuring credibility of carbon neutrality pledges in mega-events.

In the context of China’s “dual-carbon” strategy, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics provides a critical case for examining whether carbon-neutral commitments can be translated into measurable and lasting environmental outcomes through a closed-loop governance mechanism. This study develops an integrated analytical framework linking institutional design, policy tools, monitoring–reporting–verification (MRV), and environmental legacy, and evaluates full life-cycle carbon-neutral governance and post-event environmental performance using officially verified carbon accounting materials, governmental disclosures, and publicly available statistical data from 2016–2022. We synthesize the emission structure across preparation and Games-time phases, examine key mitigation and offset portfolios, and assess multi-dimensional environmental indicators in Beijing and Zhangjiakou, including atmospheric quality, energy structure transition, ecological restoration, and low-carbon transport systems. The results suggest that an MRV-centered governance chain strengthened accounting transparency and compliance-oriented implementation, while environmental indicators in the competition zones exhibited sustained improvement over the study period. To reduce over-attribution under concurrent national clean-air policies and macro-level environmental governance trends, we benchmarked host-zone indicators against external reference statistics and interpret the observed improvements as an “acceleration effect” under bounded inference rather than a strict net causal contribution. The findings highlight the importance of hotspot-oriented asset-chain governance (transport infrastructure and venue construction), robust MRV disclosure, and quality-controlled offsets in shaping credible environmental legacies, and provide policy implications for future mega-events seeking to balance carbon neutrality with long-term regional sustainability.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.3390/su18041847first seen 2026-07-18 08:39:23