BEFORE THE FIRST whistle blows at the World Cup, the event has already been mired in controversy.
From question marks over the bidding process to human rights abuses in Qatar and the deportation of workers who went months without pay all the way down to the last-minute u-turn on the sale of alcohol, it has established its legacy as a contentious World Cup long before it has even begun.
For Qatar, its biggest promise was that it would host the first carbon-neutral World Cup.
Together with FIFA, it pledged a commitment to “reducing and offsetting all carbon emissions” related to the tournament.
However, experts have raised numerous concerns linked to Qatar’s significant fossil fuel industry, the scale of emissions that will be produced, and the disputed effectiveness of ‘offsetting’ emissions.
“The majority of Qatar’s annual revenues and GDP is accounted for by oil and gas sales,” said Professor Simon Chadwick, a Professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School in France.
“This is a $240 billion World Cup that is funded by oil and gas.”
A climate-conscious Cup?
Globally, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, is paramount to preventing further temperature increases that threaten human lives and ecosystems.
The World Cup is happening back-to-back on the international stage with COP27, a major climate conference that has taken place in Egypt over the last two weeks.
Qatar is among countries to have a ‘pavilion’ in the conference’s Blue Zone, which delegations use to host events like talks or workshops and to try to showcase what they perceive as their strengths on climate.
The Qatar pavilion heavily promoted the World Cup, with much of its space given over to displaying replicas of the stadiums.
Of the eight stadiums, the Lusail and Al Bayt are due to be converted for other purposes after the World Cup while the Ahmad Bin Ali, Al Thumama, Al Janoub, Education City and Khalifa stadiums will continue to host matches, though several will have their seating capacity reduced. Stadium 974, which was made from recycled shipping containers, will be deconstructed.
A representative involved in the tournament spoke to The Journal at the pavilion about what the organisers see as its selling points.
“The World Cup has been about expediting Qatar’s vision for 2030. 2022 was like a mid-point to bring everything faster,” he said.
“What we’ve done is we have built an entire new metro system so now we have awesome public transport. 750 electric buses for the World Cup, one of the biggest fleets in the world. We’ve put an 800MW solar power plant, an area of about 1,400 football pitches. This will be there for the long-term as well.”
Describing the stadiums, he said they implemented “as many green building standards as we can”.
“All of them are modular. One of them is completely demountable, it’s been built to be taken down and moved to other places.
“The other ones have components of that system in place. They will become new community hubs, so after the World Cup we will take down half of the stands and build community facilities there like schools, hospitals, shopping malls, swimming pools, wedding halls, bowling alleys.”
When asked about the criticisms that have been levelled against it, he said: “What we have done in terms of carbon accounting, reduction and offsetting I think is the most any FIFA World Cup has done.”
“If the idea of having the FIFA World Cup is something people think is unsustainable, then maybe we should cancel the FIFA World Cup, or the other option would be to have it in the same place every year, but does it become a world cup then if it’s in the same place the whole time?”
Also at COP27 was Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney, who The Journal asked whether he believed more scrutiny is required on the climate credentials of the hosting of major sporting events.
“I think there is a lot of scrutiny actually,” the minister said.
“There’s a lot of dialogue around the appropriateness of that. I think that’s necessary because whether we like it or not, politics and sport do sometimes mix because of decisions that are made.”
‘Serious doubts’
As COP27 delegates hammered out the final details of a deal in Sharm El-Sheikh to try to steer the earth away from catastrophe, across the Arabian peninsula the final touches are being put in place at the Al Bayt Stadium in the city of Al Khor ahead of the World Cup’s opening ceremony.
One of multiple stadiums freshly built for the Cup, it received a five-star rating under the Global Sustainability Assessment System – but the impact of the stadiums on the climate and environment has still come under heavy criticism.
A report by Carbon Market Watch identified that the footprint of permanent stadiums purpose-built for the World Cup was done on a “use-share” basis.
“To put it simply, this means that the number of days of the tournament were divided by the estimated lifetime of the stadiums to arrive at the share of the total emissions associated with the construction of these facilities attributed to the World Cup,” it said.
“This is problematic because these stadiums have been constructed specifically for the World Cup. Future extensive use of so many stadiums in such a small geographical space is uncertain, especially when considered against the fact that Doha had only one major stadium before it was awarded the World Cup.”
Additionally, it said that the stadiums are unlikely to be the most efficient or effective venues for the community services that are envisioned.
“In our estimation, the total footprint of the permanent stadiums constructed for the World Cup might be underestimated by a factor of eight, amounting to 1.6 metric tonnes of CO2-equivalent (MtCO2e), rather than the reported 0.2MtCO2e.”
That’s on top of the large emissions that come from thousands of athletes and attendees travelling from around the world. In total, the assessment by organisers is that 3.6 Mt will be produced during the tournament.
For context, that’s more than what some low-emitting countries produce in an entire year, or around 5.8% of Ireland’s emissions in 2021.
And that may not even represent the actual total amount of emissions.
The Carbon Market Watch report said it had “serious doubts” about the Cup’s carbon-neutral claim, suggesting it “likely underestimates the tournament’s true emissions levels and climate impact”.
It said its analysis found that the 3.6 Mt figure “does not accurately represent the tournament’s actual footprint due to the choice of accounting approach”.
The second part of the tournament’s carbon-neutral promise is that the emissions that it produces will be offset.
However, carbon offsetting is a deeply debated strategy. In theory, it is a system of ‘compensating’ for a certain amount of carbon dioxide emissions that are produced by trying to reduce emissions elsewhere by an equivalent amount.
But even with investment in reducing emissions elsewhere or activities that remove some carbon from the atmosphere, such as planting trees – which do not always work as they’re supposed to – the release of greenhouse gas emissions in the first place still causes damage.
“Offsetting projects simply don’t deliver what we need – a reduction in the carbon emissions entering the atmosphere,” Greenpeace has insisted.
“Instead, they’re a distraction from the real solutions to climate change.”
Similarly, Professor Chadwick of the Skema Business School in France said that some of the projects being used as examples of offsetting were already in place or on track to happen.
The emissions measurements, he said, only account for the emissions happening directly during the tournament itself.
“For me, the tournament began in June 2019 when Mongolia played Burundi – but FIFA and Qatar have agreed it’s 20 November.
“Or further back than that, when they began the process [of bidding for the World Cup] they would have engaged in a lot of football diplomacy around the world.
“This is why it’s disingenuous to claim that the tournament will be net-zero carbon. They are not going to factor that into the calculation.”
And then there’s Qatar’s desalination of seawater, a process that demands large amounts of energy and can be damaging to marine life; the air conditioning systems to keep the stadiums cool; and the temporary accommodation built for visitors, all of which add on to the tournament’s ecological footprint.
“In simple terms around the World Cup itself, wherever it is, it has an environmental impact. That is indisputable,” Professor Chadwick said.
“What this World Cup is doing, though not in an elegant way, is raising awareness for the first time of the environmental impacts associated with the World Cup.”
“I hope what this World Cup is [also] doing, for the first time, is putting it to the forefront of the popular imagination how environmentally significant it is.”
Additional reporting by Gavin Cooney
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