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Little Frog Symbolizes Green Thinking at 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games

Posted on: Saturday, 29 July 2006, 15:00 CDT

By STEVE MERTL

VANCOUVER (CP) - Olympic alpine skiers flying down Whistler Mountain in 2010 may have to make a little detour around a tiny, vulnerable frog.

The coastal tailed frog, which grows to no more than three centimetres, lives in Boyd's Creek adjacent to the alpine course.

Although apparently abundant in the creek, it's listed as of special concern by the Canadian Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife.

"I'd worked on that mountain for many years and didn't realize that they even existed," says Rod MacLeod, manager of the $26-million Whistler Creekside project.

"I actually got to see one on Monday, the first one I'd seen."

The course, basically an improvement of an existing run at the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort, has been shifted away from the creek in a couple of spots, although officials may have to reroute the creek near the finish line.

Any modifications - including collecting and relocating tadpoles and frogs from the creek - will have to be approved by provincial and federal environmental officials.

MacLeod says the welfare of the little frogs was a priority early in the project's planning when every possible environmental effect was studied.

"For every item that had a potential impact we've had to come up with a commitment made to either reduce the impact as much as possible or mitigate if we have, in fact, no choice but to impact something," says MacLeod.

In another example, plans to cut down a number of trees on the ski run were delayed until wildlife experts were sure any birds' nests were no longer in use, MacLeod says.

Organizers of the 2010 Winter Olympics expect to go beyond government regulation as part of the Olympic movement's recent adoption of sustainability as a central element of its philosophy.

"The bid commitment was to apply sustainability principles to the planning, convening and legacy of the Games," says Linda Coady, vice-president of sustainability for VANOC, the Vancouver organizing committee.

"Along with the London 2012 Summer Games that follow our Games, Vancouver 2010 is the first Olympic organizing committee to make the commitment in the bid phase and actually have it written up in the host city contract that it was going to apply sustainability principles."

Two years after the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the International Olympic Committee added environmental responsibility and sustainability to the Olympic charter. It became a third pillar of the Games, along with sport and culture.

In 1999, the IOC adopted its own version of the UN's Agenda 21 on sustainable development.

Successive Olympics have used the Games to highlight environmental goals, says Coady.

The Sydney Summer Games in 2000 focused on water conservation, while the Winter Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 and Turin, Italy, in 2006 were certified as carbon neutral in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

Coady, a former environmental executive with forest companies MacMillan-Bloedel and Weyerhaeuser, says Salt Lake also created a solid-waste recycling program, achieving an 80 per cent recycling rate.

Vancouver aims to build on that, she says, with goals of achieving zero waste, carbon neutral emissions and maximizing the use of so-called green buildings at Olympic venues.

It's hard to say whether these goals will add to the bottom-line capital cost of the Games, Coady says. Projects will have to have a strong business case.

"So we do have to make some choices," she says.

"We're not going to go to the nth degree of innovative technology at every venue, on every water-waste or air or energy application."

But she says the objective is to offer substantive - not symbolic - solutions that may add a couple of percentage points to front-end costs but offer long-term energy and environmental savings to those who inherit Olympic venues after the Games.

"We're trying to mount a model of sustainability here that isn't a gold-plated hood ornament," says Coady.

Taxpayers won't be footing the entire green bill, however. Many of VANOC's corporate partners are offering products at cost so they can use the Games to showcase the their newest technologies, says Coady.

Source: Canadian Press

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