London 2012 and Climate Change. Examining the potential impact of the current economic crisis in the environmental legacy of the Games

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) declares environmental protection to be the third dimension of the Olympic movement. That, in effect, means that nations wishing to host the Games have to present themselves as reliable practitioners of environmental sustainability (ES) in their applications. The greening of sports mega-events, and the hosting of Olympic Games in particular, is now reasonably well established. Yet evidence from the first decade of environmentally-conscious Olympics points to diverging patterns of achievement in the operationalisation of the IOC’s ‘third pillar’. As is now common knowledge, for example, Sydney 2000 was the first ‘Green Olympics’ in the history of the Games; yet four years later, Athens provided a stark contrast, and was the subject of highly critical assessment reports by environmental organisations. Yet Athens has not stopped the Bid Committee for the Beijing 2008 Games claiming that it would ‘leave the greatest Olympic Games environmental legacy ever’ (UNEP 2007: 26), while the London 2012 promotes the concept of the ‘One Planet Olympics’.

In this context and in light of the current global economic crisis, can we claim that London 2012 has the capacity to fulfil its environmental ambitions? This question is adopted in continuity with similar framed questions that have been posed in relation to the most recent Olympics and it is tackled by adopting an investigative model that is placed within discourses of ‘reflexive modernisation’.

Ranges of bimodule projections and reflexivity

We develop a general framework for reflexivity in dual Banach
spaces, motivated by the question of when the weak* closed linear
span of two reflexive masa-bimodules is automatically reflexive. We
establish an affirmative answer to this question in a number of
cases by examining two new classes of masa-bimodules, defined in
terms of ranges of masa-bimodule projections. We give a number of
corollaries of our results concerning operator and spectral
synthesis, and show that the classes of masa-bimodules we study are
operator synthetic if and only if they are strong operator Ditkin.