Welcome to SI Climate, our ongoing series on how sport is adapting to and influencing our changing world.
Inside Yankee Stadium’s Legends Suite, Allen Hershkowitz sipped cabernet and talked about a video conference he held with sustainability officials for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. An environmental scientist who also advises the NBA and MLS, Hershkowitz works full-time for the Yankees overseeing their sustainability efforts, the first person to hold that type of role in American professional sports. He has become the go-to authority for teams, leagues and other organizations seeking direction on green initiatives. So in September 2021, when a colleague working with World Cup organizers asked him to brief the Qatari group on climate best practices, Hershkowitz wanted to say yes.
This particular World Cup—with seven new stadiums, a new subway system, and a (literally) small nation’s worth of new air conditioning, brought to you by sponsors like QatarEnergy, the state-owned oil and gas giant—has long been a notoriously climate-unfriendly affair. During Hershkowitz’s presentation, one of the representatives of Qatar spoke with a bold claim: “We plan to announce that we will be carbon and plastic neutral.”
Hershkowitz balked at the suggestion: “I said, ‘Please don’t do it. Don’t do it.'”
Alas, he was too late. A day earlier, Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC) boasted in a press release that it would “enable a plastic-neutral tournament,” explaining it by “physically removing plastic waste from rivers and oceans. . . the amount collected will be equal to the plastic waste generated from the FIFA World Cup.”
Although this particular announcement later disappeared from Qatar 2022’s official website – hunting down old soda bottles does not negate the environmental impact of producing massive amounts of new plastic – the World Cup organizer continued to promote its tournament as carbon neutral. This despite the fact that, according to their own conservative calculation, hosting the 28-day tournament will produce 3.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a 67% increase over Russia 2018.
Qatar 2022 carbon neutral? “There’s no way in the world,” Hershkowitz says, adding, “There’s no such thing as plastic being neutral.”
A SC spokesperson responded: “We are committed to our sustainability strategy to deliver the world’s first carbon-free FIFA World Cup and are on track to meet this target.” The spokesman also cited Qatar 2022’s green initiatives and said it would buy “certified and recognized” carbon credits to offset unavoidable emissions.
But to climate experts like Hershkowitz, the manual is a classic case of what’s known as greenwashing. “Greenwashing is the idea that you signal good behavior in relation to environmental objects, often the climate, but in reality it’s just a signal,” says Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.
The corporate world is awash in such behavior—JetBlue, for example, boasts of carb-free flights, a literally impossible feat for non-flyers—and sports are catching up.
For one thing, sports’ direct environmental impact is usually more limited than people think: According to data analyzed by Pielke and his colleagues, the collective annual emissions of the NFL, NBA and NHL are only about a minute and a half. of the US annual footprint.
On the other hand, the sports world is full of teams, leagues and organizations that fail to meet even the most basic aspects of their environmental obligations. Certainly no scientist expects the World Cup – or any other league, team or tournament – to solve climate change. But several who spoke to Sports Illustrated said sports can play a positive role.
As many of these experts have noted, sports organizations have unparalleled influence over fans, not to mention significant power over sponsors and business partners. What matters is what they say and do. Especially when they say one thing and do another.
Qatar has built seven new stadiums as part of a major nation-building spree for the 2022 World Cup.
In October 2017, representatives from the worlds of sport and environmental science gathered in Bonn, Germany for a two-day United Nations workshop. Organizers were curious if the sports groups in attendance – among them FIFA, UEFA and the Philadelphia Eagles – could use their platforms to talk to fans about the urgent need for climate action. But the answer was clear: Teams and leagues felt like they couldn’t talk until they improved their own efforts.
The UN Climate Action Framework was born out of those talks. Presented at the next year’s UN climate summit, the initiative had no specific goals at the outset. Instead, the framework committed signatories to deliberately broad principles, including a pledge to “reduce overall climate impacts.” The framework also directed signatories to calculate a baseline footprint by measuring greenhouse gas emissions as a “starting point”.
In short order, sports organizations raced to put their brands in the frame: More than 300 signed on, ranging from major federations like the IOC to leagues like the NBA and NFL, to clubs like the Yankees, Warriors and Liverpool FC , to smaller outfits like Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minn., and the Austrian Ocean Race project.
“We had five principles that were quite broad, but we knew that all these different sports organizations were at different levels of maturity,” says Lindita Xhaferi-Salihu, head of the sport and fashion sector at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). , the branch that oversees the program. “Everyone will have different ways of influencing those shows or not. They will have different capacities. We told them, here are the five principles. Make a plan based on that. … We all have to start somewhere. We, on this journey, need all hands on deck.”
Many of the signatories were eager to boast of their commitment to the program, soaking up the good publicity. But far fewer have actually delivered on their promises. A year after the framework was established, in 2019, the UNFCCC conducted a survey asking whether signatories were measuring greenhouse gas emissions. “At the time there were 249 signatories,” says Hershkowitz, who participated in one of the framework’s working groups. “Over 60% have not started the measurement process.”
The UNFCCC is starting to pay off. Last year, the body began requiring signatories to submit a report detailing their organizations’ emissions and actions being taken to reduce them. However, Jaferi-Salihu says that about a third of the signatories have not done so. Those organizations that did not apply by the end of August lost their accreditation in the framework.
In the future, she adds, public reporting on emissions will be required to maintain signatory status. Departing from its more lenient earlier guidelines, the UNFCCC late last year also set tough targets for new signatories, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and reaching net zero by 40. Soon all signatories will have to adopt these standards; failing to do so could result in the program being triggered, says Xhaferi-Salihu.
Hershkowitz, for its part, does not currently advise its clients to publicly report their impact data. There is too much disagreement about how indirect impacts should be measured—for example, how do you measure emissions from fans traveling to games, or from the production of plastic cups sold at stadiums, or even from the production of footballs—he says. “You want to make sure that anything you put out in public is true and verifiable,” he says. “The NBA, the Yankees and the MLS — I told them we’re not going public with it. . . . Right now, getting that data is a moving target.”
For Xhaferi-Salihua, however, that kind of explanation doesn’t wash. For progress, she believes, there must be public accounting, even if imperfect. “If you sign up as a sports organization and then you think you’re done with your signature, and if you maybe use your Twitter now and then, you’re done – I don’t think so,” she says. “Sustainability, at the end of the day, unfortunately, is not just about storytelling; it’s about the numbers.”
Holding the 2022 Winter Games in an area not known for heavy snowfall required organizers to produce loads of fake powder.
It is true that many sports organizations that have signed the UN framework make a good argument that greater responsibility is needed.
Ahead of the last Winter Games, for example, the IOC issued breathless press releases announcing that every venue in Beijing would be powered entirely by renewable energy, but glossed over how Beijing in 2022 had diverted groundwater to make 1, 2 million cubic meters of fake snow that covered every ski slope or that he bulldozed part of a mountain nature reserve to build a bobsleigh, skeleton and luge center. “Sustainability in the Olympics has . . . declined significantly over time,” concludes an academic paper in the spring 2021 issue of the journal Nature.
The sports world is full of similar performance efforts, from one-off composting nights at stadiums to a fleet of hydrogen-powered trucks that delivered beer to SoFi Stadium for Super Bowl LVI. But according to experts, the most common move in the greenwashing game is buying carbon offsets.
While some types of compensation purchased by companies are productive, many experts consider them worse than useless. There is what Texas A&M sports management professor Brian McCullough describes as a cottage industry of “rogue, illegitimate carbon reduction programs” that lure teams and other clients with cheap costs and easy PR, but lack transparency about how that money is actually being used. environment. McCullough adds that offsets based on planting new trees – one of the most common species – are particularly problematic, as the tree takes decades to mature and begin absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, but does nothing to supposedly offset emissions today. “It really is the Wild Wild West,” McCullough says.
He argues that buying offsets should be a “last resort scenario” for a sports organization, but he sees many starting their green efforts by cutting a check. “It’s a quick fix,” he says. Moreover, the obscure mathematics often involved in calculating offsets can lead to even more exaggerated claims. “Claiming carbon neutrality is quite frankly BS, but many are going down that road because it’s becoming an institutionalized practice,” he says. “One team does it, and then others follow.”
McCullough encountered this in 2019, when he was working at Seattle University and MLS’s Sounders declared themselves the first carbon-neutral soccer team in North America and the first carbon-neutral professional sports team in the US. data, however, McCullough ran into a roadblock: The team, he says, would not share the numbers. The Sounders declined to comment to SI.
Carbon offsets are far from the only problem. Hershkowitz, for his part, takes a particularly skeptical view of the many cryptocurrency teams and leagues, calling the industry’s carbon footprint an environmental disaster. (Bitcoin alone, according to the University of Cambridge, consumes about 97.93 terawatt hours of electricity per year—more than all of Belgium.) Hershkowitz recalls trying to educate an American team of experts on the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies: He says the head of a marketing club is replied: “I don’t believe you and we’re not changing anything.”
At the Aspen Institute’s inaugural climate change conference in May, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the league’s goal – as a signatory to the UN framework – is to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and reach net zero by ’40. At the same time, however, Silver has positioned the NBA at the forefront of the cryptocurrency industry, with the league signing a four-year, $192 million deal on Oct. 21 with exchange platform Coinbase. Also last year, Crypto.com shelled out more than $700 million to rebrand the Staples Center in Los Angeles, while FTX took on the title sponsor for the Heat’s arena in Miami.
An NBA spokesperson did not directly respond to questions about how the league’s crypto partnership aligns with its sustainability commitments, but praised the work the league has done to promote environmental awareness and “minimize our footprint” over the past 15 years since its creation. its NBA Green Program. “Through our partnerships, we’re exploring ways we can work together to address and mitigate our environmental impact while raising awareness of sustainability globally,” the spokesperson said. “We are aware that we, together with society, have much more work to do.”
Of course, many teams and leagues have partnerships with carbon-intensive industries, such as oil companies (Aramco is Formula 1’s global partner) and airlines. Hershkowitz and many experts see those kinds of relationships with sponsors as a critical tool for achieving sustainable solutions that a team can’t achieve alone. They see opportunities for teams to push their partners toward a more sustainable path.
Overall, McCullough says, “progress hasn’t been where you’d think it should be” in the sports world. Part of this is a function of a relative lack of resources: dedicated staff, operational purchasing, and potentially expensive equipment (the best control panel can cost more than $5 million, although budget solutions exist) are all required just to monitor emissions data. “You’re seeing teams really take it seriously,” he says, “but because of internal constraints, it’s slower than if Amazon came on the scene and said, ‘This is an important initiative. We have the capacity to hire a team of 50 people.”
On the other hand, while minor league clubs or small college programs may struggle to measure up, it goes without saying that top-level sports leagues are multibillion-dollar operations. “The sports industry is obviously focused on on-field performance and kicking ass in seats,” says McCullough. He believes teams will only really act on environmental issues if fans push them. “It was wait and see,” he says. “What will the fans want?”
It’s not all bad news: Colorado’s athletic department is one program moving in a greener direction.
So what should fans demand from their favorite teams and leagues? And what role should sport play?
McCullough is urging teams and venues to increase their commitment to renewable energy while reducing dependence on fossil fuels, pointing to Amsterdam’s entirely wind and solar-powered Johan Cruijff Arena, home of top-flight soccer club AFC Ajax, as one shining example. But, as McCullough notes, those kinds of measures address the direct impact of sport, but do little to influence broader forces. “The sports industry depends on other industries,” says McCullough. “Travel is the elephant in the room.”
Seth Wynes, a postdoctoral researcher on climate solutions at Concordia University, saw one potential solution on this front in 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the four major North American men’s leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) all dramatically—if inadvertently – reduce their shows through various schedule adjustments (cancelling foreign trips, grouping games by region, increasing the number of “baseball-style” series). If these changes became permanent, Wynes later concluded in a study published in the journal Environmental Science & The technology, “could be expected to reduce emissions by 22% each year.”
Earlier this summer, at a sports conference in Odense, Denmark, Pielke took the stage and gave a speech titled “How not to go green.” Near the end, under a point describing carbon offsets as “gimmicks,” Pielke listed three broader “alternatives” for sports organizations seeking to make an impact on the environment: “educate fans about the scale of the problem”; “promote policies that work on the decarbonization of energy systems”; and “consider other goals [of environmental management in society] beyond the climate on which the actions of sports organizations can have a more direct impact.”
In other words, he asked sports organizations to use their considerable social and financial capital for good.
“The biggest plus for sports is the impact it has on fans,” says Dave Newport, director of the Center for the Environment at the University of Colorado. Teams can “empower fans to be more sustainable at home, at work and at play,” he says.
Since 2008, Newport has also led the way at Colorado, launching the first dedicated sustainability program within a Division I athletic department. One result: At CU football games, the university says 90% of waste is now diverted.
Newport believes that companies’ exaggerated claims about environmental policies are actually a good sign. “Personally, I like greenwashing,” he says, “because it’s the first step to real action. If you get caught, you take a hit in sales, you have to clean it up.
“I don’t really care what the motives are, as long as they are real. The atmosphere doesn’t care how the carbon got up there. How much.”
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What was the most sustainable Olympic Games?
The 2002 Salt Lake City Summer Olympics, the 1992 Albertville Winter Games in France, and the 1992 Barcelona Games were ranked as the most sustainable Olympic Games.
Are the Winter Olympics sustainable? The snowmaking equipment is powered by 100 percent renewable energy, and a number of water conservation and recycling designs are in place to optimize water use. Read also : Women’s Soccer Teams Debut In EA Sports’ FIFA Franchise. In the process of making snow, no chemicals are used in order to avoid impacts on the local ecosystem.
Was the Rio Olympics sustainable?
The 2016 Rio Games, for example, produced 17,000 tonnes of waste, used 29,500 gigawatts of electricity, most of which came from non-renewable sources, and consumed 23,500 liters of fuel. The Rio Games released a total of 3.6 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
Are the Olympic Games sustainable?
In 2018, the United Nations passed a resolution declaring ‘sport as an engine of sustainable development’ and signed a letter of intent highlighting the Olympic Games’ contribution to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ‘ This may interest you : Arizona Sports Betting: Mobile Sports Betting Promo Code, Caesars Sportsbook App, Legal Sites, Bonuses.
How did Japan make the Olympics sustainable?
A number of measures have been implemented to reduce CO2, including saving energy, using existing premises and using fuel-efficient vehicles to reduce pollution. On the same subject : The first ‘NFT games console’ has been announced. In addition, CO2 emissions from the Games were reduced by 800,000 tons due to the fact that the Games were held almost without spectators.
What is the most unsustainable sport?
The worst sports for the environment include skydiving (mass relative carbon footprint), golf (water and chemical consumption required), auto racing and other motor sports (absolute carbon emissions), and motorized water sports (fuel consumption and biosphere disruption). What is this?
How does sport negatively affect the environment? Golf courses spread across the country and use large amounts of pesticides and water, while parking lots for stadiums and arenas create huge paved areas. And big sporting events consume energy, emit greenhouse gases and produce a huge amount of garbage.
What are some unsustainable items?
Everyday unsustainable products you use unknowingly but shouldn’t
- Packaging material. …
- Toothbrush and toothpaste. …
- Wet wipes and wipes. …
- Tea bags. …
- Cleaning products. …
- Non-stick cookware.
How much does F1 contribute to pollution?
F1 performed a detailed analysis of the carbon footprint. For the entire racing season, approximately 256,000 tons of CO2 equivalent are produced. By 2030 this will be net zero.
Which sport has the biggest carbon footprint?
Football, as the biggest and certainly the most influential sport in the world, has the ability to set an example for its fans and other sports. Approximately 60% of football’s carbon footprint comes from spectators traveling to matches.
What is the carbon footprint of football? In 2017, the University of Essex calculated the total greenhouse gas emissions from transport to and from stadiums for third-tier football matches in the 2012/13 season, which was estimated at 56,237 tonnes of CO2e. And the bigger the game, the bigger its carbon footprint, as fans tend to travel further for important games.
What is the biggest contributor to our carbon footprint?
The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in the United States is the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation.
What is the carbon footprint of F1?
F1 performed a detailed analysis of the carbon footprint. For the entire racing season, approximately 256,000 tons of CO2 equivalent are produced. By 2030 this will be net zero.
Are sports stadiums bad for the environment?
Stadiums can have a negative impact on the environment. From concrete construction to transportation, spaces like SoFi can impact our earth through air pollution and waste disposal.
Are football stadiums bad for the environment? The global soccer industry produces more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, about the same as a small country like Denmark. According to one projection, continued warming means that a quarter of England’s football pitches will be at risk of flooding every season for the next three decades.
How much waste do sports stadiums produce?
Each year, the Super Bowl generates about 40 tons of waste, and attendees at sporting events across the U.S. generate about 39 million pounds of trash annually.
How are stadiums becoming more sustainable?
Energy conservation: in order to reduce energy consumption, more and more stadiums are being built to save energy consumption and even equipped with solar and wind to provide them with an alternative source of energy.
