Saunter into the lush outlier of the newly-built Winter Olympic Forest Park situated in Beijing's northern district of Yanqing, and the first thing you will pick out is not flourishing saplings or bewitching flowers, but a host of QR codes hung on the tree trunks. 

Point your smartphone cameras at those square black-and-white dot matrices, all the multimedia information you would like to know about the plant – from its name, age, type, classification to the specific detail of its transplanting process – pops up on your phone screen in a split second.

The ubiquitous codes, which have already played a crucial role in contact tracing during China's battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, are just taking off in the park. They could be seen as an apt testament to Beijing's pledge to stage a Green Olympics, which has been a central part of its bid for the Games. Indeed, since winning its Olympic bid exactly five years ago today, the organizers has pulled out all the stops to minimize environmental impact in running the quadrennial sporting extravaganza.

A case in point is plant transplanting. According to the Yanqing Forestry Bureau, more than 20,000 plants in the forest park, including the protected syringa reticulata, juglans mandshurica and fraxinus rhynchophylla, have been transplanted with utmost care from the mountain areas that are being built for Beijing 2022 venues.

"We have maintained close contact with the experts from the Beijing Forestry University and they carried out an ecological survey on this area before mapping out a feasible transplanting plan to conserve native flora," said Pang Yuelong, vice director of the bureau.

"It's extremely challenging to transplant plants that are growing 800 meters above sea level, particularly in the summer when their roots are vulnerable to damage and dehydration, but after multiple rounds of trials and tests, the success rate of it now stands at 90 percent," he added.

Liang Dedong, director of sustainability for Beijing Enterprises J.O Construction Co., Ltd, also set great store by environmental conservation in Yanqing, where the Alpine skiing, bobsleigh and luge events will be held during the 2022 Games.

"We have set up a special work group to focus on sustainable development and managed to enlist the help of top-ranked independent consultants to get to the bottom of knotty problems about ecological protection in this competition zone," said Liang.

"All the venues that we construct in Yanqing, including the Olympic Village, the National Alpine Skiing Center and the National Sliding Center are making full use of renewable and recyclable materials and are completely in line with green standards," he observed.

Liang and his team regularly ferret around the construction site for signs of environmental breaches, such as a tower crane impacting the distribution of plant species and vegetation. They zeroed in on the problem before putting together a report and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Similar preference for sustainability could also be found throughout the Genting Snow Park in Chongli County of Zhangjiakou, where the snowboard parallel giant slalom, snowboard slopestyle and snowboard halfpipe events will be staged.

As the co-host city of the 2022 Olympics, Zhangjiakou has set in motion 76 projects, under which there are countless key tasks and specific road maps that aim to strengthen regional collaboration to improve the environment and coordinated development in the Beijing-Zhangjiakou region.

Attention has also centered on an exhaustive scheme to expedite the completion of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou High-speed Railway and the Beijing-Chongli Expressway, which could spur monumental progress in terms of environmental, regional and social evolution.

Such meticulous attention to detail has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that when the Winter Olympics come to China in less than two years' time, its organizers will not only be hoping to nail the medal table, they will also be craving to dazzle the world with their green commitments.

The Beijing Games are only the second Winter Olympics to achieve ISO 20121 certification, an international standard governing sustainable event management created by the International Organization for Standardization. 

"The certification guarantees that we keep up an exemplary approach to sustainable development, and we have the ambition to scale new heights, exceeding expectations of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)," beamed Liu Xinping, who heads the sustainability division of the General Planning Department for Beijing 2022.

Close observers of China's unswerving sustainability efforts have given a complimentary verdict.  IOC Vice-President Juan Antonio Samaranch proclaimed that the organizers' hard work "provides a comprehensive framework for the overall sustainability vision of the 2022 Games."

That stance was echoed by International Paralympic Committee (IPC) President Andrew Parsons who commended Beijing for "taking the lead on sustainability in order to create a new model for the Olympic and Paralympic Games." 

"Not only is Beijing 2022 looking to lead the way in making a huge positive difference to society, it is making itself accountable by laying bare exactly what this plan aims to achieve," he added.

Not that Beijing 2022's vision of being "green, open, inclusive and clean" slows down its preparations whatsoever, all 26 venues for the eagerly awaited Winter Games have reached the final stage of the construction or renovation, and are on track to be completed by the end of this year.

The Winter Olympic Forest Park, meanwhile, is scheduled to open to the public as early as October. Using the Games to place itself as a spearhead of the global sustainability movement, China is going all-in on green.

(Video editor: Niu Yuan)