The World Cup Is An Amazing Platform For Promoting Climate Action

By Dr Russell Seymour, Founder and Executive Chair of BASIS (the British Association for Sustainable Sport).

Major sporting events like the World Cup have huge potential to be a force for good that shine a light on the most important issues facing humanity: tackling climate change, addressing biodiversity loss and living as sustainably as we can.

As the first sustainability manager at a major British sports venue, Lord’s Cricket Ground, I know how unifying sport can be and its power to raise awareness of the most important challenges the world faces. I’m passionate about making a difference through sport, as it’s a powerful tool that engages most of the population.

If done intelligently and responsibly, the potential for sport – and the World Cup especially – to raise awareness and instigate collective action on climate change is enormous, and we should be harnessing that potential.

It's easy and, perhaps, understandable to go down the doom and gloom route when thinking about climate change – there are many things happening around the world that impact a large number of people. But there are very few other mediums whereby there is as much collective passion as there is in sport. And major events like the World Cup offer a big opportunity to do something good for the environment, notwithstanding the impacts of the event itself.

The power is in and with the people. Sport can make issues such as climate change more real for people who might not otherwise engage with them in their daily lives. Seeing someone you look up to, like a famous footballer, talk about climate change and sustainability means that they’re much more likely to engage with the issue and then act. Or hearing and seeing best practice being mentioned within the punditry during the tournament, integrated seamlessly into the conversation, will raise awareness of the issues and engage listeners. In cricket, the length of matches allowed for punditry to cover a wide range of topics. A month of football in Qatar will provide football commentators and pundits an opportunity to do the same.

Until there’s something – or someone – that makes climate change relevant to the lives of everyday people, it’s a difficult topic for everyone to relate to directly on a personal level, despite it being a problem that affects everyone on the planet.

Waste management is perhaps the area where sport can have the greatest impact and normalise best practice. At Lord’s, we tackled the use of single use plastics and removed nearly two million pieces a year. Waste management at sporting events is a massive problem just because of the number of people that attend. The government of Qatar wants 60% of all waste generated at the World Cup to be recycled or reused, avoiding tons going to landfill or incineration. With almost 3 million tickets for the World Cup sold so far, focusing on waste could have a huge impact on raising awareness of sustainability issues and collectively making a big impact.

All sporting events create a carbon footprint by their very design, so the focus should be about mitigating this impact as it can’t be avoided altogether. Whilst the World Cup involves fans, players and officials flying from all around the world, the event in Qatar is unique compared to previous tournaments as the eight venues where the matches will be played are all based in close proximity, meaning the fans and teams won’t need to travel as much, so saving tons of emissions.

Whilst sport has a unique role to play in driving sustainability and grounding best practice through tangible actions and results, it cannot do it alone. Attempts to drive sustainability at sporting events such as the World Cup need to be integrated with other stakeholders and sectors, such as transport, to drive overall decarbonisation and mitigate impact.

The World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world, and like other major sporting events, it can use that unique platform for good. This is a huge opportunity to push forward progress on climate action and sustainability issues on the world’s biggest stage.