SUMMER OF SUSTAINABLE SPORT
For many, summer is all about sport. The Women’s World Cup, the Ashes, Wimbledon, the Tour de France… the list goes on. These great spectacles provide great entertainment, but have you ever wondered how green they really are?
As Paris unveils its plans to make the 2024 Olympic Games the most sustainable ever, our sustainability expert Sarah Walkley looks at the impact of sporting events on our planet.
Major sporting events mark our lives. They are important cultural events. People can often tell you where they were when England scored the winning goal in the 1966 World Cup, when Andy Murray won Wimbledon or England’s women’s team won the Euros.
They can also have a significant impact on the planet. It’s hard to calculate the emissions from a sporting event as big as the football World Cup, but even the most conservative estimates suggest the four-week event in Qatar generated as many emissions as some small countries in a whole year.
What drives these emissions?
One of the biggest contributors is the building of new sporting venues. Events like Wimbledon which are held in the same place year after year have a lower impact than the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games and major football tournaments which move to a new city each time. That is one reason why the Paris organising committee has said that they will only build two new venues. The remaining 36 competing sites to be used next year are all existing venues. The International Olympic Committee has also recently changed its rules to allow host cities to use an existing venue further away rather than build new.
However, while big venue construction does not have the biggest impact. We do. About 75-80% of the emissions from any sporting event come from spectators - how they travel to the event and where they stay. The food served at the event also has a big role to play.
What can we do?
This means that we can all play our part in keeping the impact of big events as low as possible while not missing out on the fun. We can choose to go to the Paris Olympics because we can get there by train, rather than wait another four years and fly all the way to Los Angeles. Or maybe we can switch to taking the bus to our favourite football team’s home games.
We can take our own snacks, our reusable water bottle and think carefully about whether we really need to buy a comedy hat or the latest version of the team kit.
Of course, many of us do these things any way to be able to manage the costs of supporting our favourite team. Sporting events are simply a clear demonstration of how the small choices we all make can also have a big collective impact on the planet.
Sarah Walkley is a freelance writer and researcher on a mission to empower everyone to play their part in addressing climate change and nature loss.
She set up Purplefully to help organisations develop their sustainability strategy and communication.
