How Can the Olympics Impact Air Quality? A Beijing Success Story

Prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China’s poor air quality was infamous. In an effort to clean up its house before hosting, the Chinese government put in place measures to clear the smog: pausing industry, cutting driving, and more. These changes weren’t made sustainably, however, and after the games ended and fans went home, pollution levels soon rebounded. 

By 2013, citizens were fed up with their consistently poor breathing environment (which a 2014 Guardian article called an “airpocalypse” and “almost uninhabitable”). They demanded air quality monitoring and data to make pollution levels transparent. The government relented, and acted decisively across policy areas to pursue a long-term, blue sky vision of lasting clean air.

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Fast forward to winter 2022, when Beijing hosted the Olympics once again. The difference was stark: in the years since public outrage in 2013, the city’s air pollution fell by 55 percent. At the same time, the average resident’s life expectancy increased by an average of 4.6 years!  

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Recounting this remarkable “tale of two Olympics", data scientist Hannah Ritchie writes in her book Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet* that “[China’s] work is not done. But its example offers us an important lesson in how quickly we can act when we have the tools: a demanding citizenship, the money and political will.”

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Citizenship, money, political will, of course. And, we’d emphasize, data—specifically, data in the hands of communities most affected by pollution.

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Knowledge was key to making these changes. Monitoring and a 2013 study generated public awareness, which led to pressure which led to coal plant shutdowns, industrial regulations, taking old cars off the road, and other tools in government's clean air policy toolkit (some of which admittedly hold lessons for more just transitions elsewhere).

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Sitting where we sit, we can’t help but notice that for these changes to take place, an engaged public had to know air conditions were poor and advocate for better. And that’s where we asJustAir come in. The skies in our partner communities may not look like Beijing’s before 2008 or in 2013, but the air is far from the cleanness we envision as a universal standard. That’s why we partner with communities to provide citizen scientists and local governments access to localized, real-time and historic air quality data, so that they can use this information to push for change and protect their families and constituents. That is the vision we pursue every day. 

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We hope this brief air quality x Olympic story can, like the games themselves, help to inspire us toward the kind of world we all deserve. 

*This story is also summarized in several articles and a fascinating report, The 2008 Olympics to the 2022 Olympics: China’s Fight to Win its War Against Pollution.