Climate protestors are targeting sport to put global warming at the heart of cultural conversations. So what can rights-holders do to appease them?
This October, the hosts of the Alpine World Cup skiing event in Zermatt and Cervinia came up with a memorable solution to the absence of snow on parts of its four-kilometre course.
Like a man trying to halt the upwards retreat of his hairline with strategically placed implants, the event’s organising committee used diggers to excavate snow from the resorts’ Theodul Glacier for use on lower-lying slopes left bare by mild weather.
When Swiss publication 20 Minuten released images of the excavators on the glacier – which has shrunk by 10 per cent over the last two years due to climate change – professional skiers and the environmental campaign group, Protect Our Winters (POW), seized on the moment to criticise the sport’s administrators. French skier Alexis Pinturault said scheduling the event in November made ‘no sense’ and echoed calls by POW for the International Ski Federation (FIS) to adapt its calendar to the changing climate. Others argued the organisers had placed money before the environment, insisting on the early start date because sponsors prefer to promote themselves at the start of the winter season.
In an interview with 20 Minuten, Franz Julen, president of the local organising committee, said although the images of the diggers ‘looked bad’, no one was ‘breaking off the glacier’ and accused campaigners of scapegoating the event. The FIS went further, challenging the authenticity of some of the photos and accusing the campaigners of ‘attention-seeking stunts’.
Even if the images were misconstrued, there’s no escaping climate change is a problem of the present for the winter sports industry and efforts to continue with the status quo are becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
The International Olympic Committee – which already struggled to identify cities able to afford hosting the Winter Olympics – recently revealed it would award the hosting rights to the 2030 and 2034 editions at the same time due to concerns over climate change. IOC president Thomas Bach said just 15 countries across three continents meet the criteria for hosting the event currently, but predicted this would reduce to just 10 by 2040.
In another illustration of the challenges, The Snow Thieves, a February 2023 report by UK climate thinktank the New Weather Institute, laid bare the Winter Olympics’ reliance on artificial snow – an inherently expensive, water-intensive and unsustainable practice.
The practice began at the 1980 event in Lake Placid. By the time Sochi hosted the Games in 2014, around 80 per cent of the snow was artificial, with this figure rising to 98 per cent for Pyeongchang in 2018 and 100 per cent for Beijing in 2022.
The use of artificial snow began at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. By the time Beijing hosted the Games in 2022, 100 per cent of the snow was artificial
Different extremes
While skiing is an obvious poster boy for the climate crisis, other sports and events will also suffer. The IOC faced problems of a different sort at the 2021 Tokyo summer Olympics where it had to stage the marathon running events at midnight to protect its athletes from extreme heat. Formula 1 has also suffered from two sides of the crisis, cancelling this year’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix because of flooding in Italy while drivers complained that they had nearly passed out in their cockpits due to the heat at this year’s Qatar Grand Prix.
When record wildfires in Australia in 2020 caused a pall of black smoke to hang over the country, a female tennis player was forced to retire from the qualifiers for the Australian Open after suffering a coughing fit. Similarly, Major League Baseball postponed two games in New York and Philadelphia this season after medical experts warned that wildfires in Canada had created hazardous air quality conditions.
Examples like this have made the sports industry an easy target for climate campaign groups like POW and the New Weather Institute, which have pounced on the cognitive dissonance that appears to exist in sport to drive home their own messages. Although Andrew Simms, co-author of the Snow Thieves report and co-founder of New Weather Institute, acknowledges organisations like FIS and the IOC have done much to address their impact on the environment, he says they are also guilty of contradictory postures.
As with most sports, they encourage and depend on carbon-intensive international air travel and tourism to boost attendances. And, as protestors have been quick to point out, they are also guilty of accepting sponsorship money from fossil-fuel industries.
The Snow Thieves report, for instance, identified 107 ‘high carbon’ sponsorship deals with skiing organisations, events and athletes and accused the brands involved of “melting the future of the very sports they sponsor”.
One of the things about sport is suddenly you see this issue playing out in something people can relate to and in which they can see the consequences
– Andrew Simms, The New Weather Institute
Simms says sport in general makes for a particularly influential case study because of its widespread appeal across different cultures and age groups.
“The debate around climate change has for decades taken place amongst a fairly specialist community where […] you talk all of the scientific language, but it hasn’t got under the skin of popular conversations. One of the things about sport is suddenly you see this issue playing out in something that people can relate to and in which they can see the consequences.”
Inspiring change
The New Weather Institute aims to influence environmental policymaking across multiple industries, as well as make climate change more of a cultural issue. The thinktank highlights the adaptations being implemented in sectors like energy, transport and agriculture to inspire others to change.
Starting with first principles, Simms believes sports rights-holders need to address their own impact on the environment before going down the value chain. While he’s realistic enough not to suggest that this should spell the end for sport’s ‘travelling circus’ model, he thinks it should be recalibrated to make significant reductions in carbon emissions. “You could begin simply by asking questions about the design of competitions. How do you minimise impacts? We know that some of the biggest impacts are the so called ‘scope three’ impacts which are the ones when you’re dragging thousands of fans around the world,” he says. “The big-ticket items tend to come from having a lot of people flying.”
For that reason, he questions Fifa’s recent announcement that it would host the 2030 World Cup in six countries and across three different continents. To boot, its drive to deliver more commercial revenues from the event will see the tournament expand from 32 teams to 48 in 2026, vastly increasing its impact on the environment.
He argues the hosting decision is completely at odds with the global federation’s sustainability messaging. That it made the announcement at the same time Fifa representatives were speaking at the Sport Positive Summit, a sustainability event in London, made it appear like the federation was “hanging its people out to dry,” he says.
Local versus global
Russell Seymour, founder of the British Association for Sustainable Sport, can fully understand how commercial imperatives often undermine well-meaning environmental initiatives in sport.
An environmental scientist by background, in 2000 he landed a position as the first full-time sustainability manager for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) after compiling a report into the environmental impact of staging a five-day test cricket match.
“I’m being flippant, but the most sustainable event you can do is one that you don’t do,” he says. “There will be no impact at all – although nobody wants that. We still want to see elite sport, and it’s a complete contradiction.”
He was equally appalled by Fifa’s 2030 World Cup announcement and describes it as a missed opportunity to promote a more environmentally friendly message.
One way it could do this, he argues, would be to embrace a more ‘focused’ hosting model where the earlier rounds of tournaments are staged at a local level, with a smaller and more condensed number of elite teams travelling to complete the final stages of competitions to minimise travel.
“You need a broader base to the [qualification] pyramid and you gradually siphon teams out. You would still have those elite pathways that bring people through, but you would try to reduce the impact of that.”
Professional skiers and POW are placing similar demands on FIS in their calls for a more ‘geographically reasonable’ race calendar. The demands appeared in an open letter to the federation from a group of 200 skiers who also questioned the need for the men’s Alpine World Cup to travel from Europe to America and back two times during the season.
“The races of Beaver Creek in November and those in Aspen [in Colorado] in February are 50 km away from each other. Planning those two races one after the other would reduce approximately 1.500 tonnes of CO2,” the skiers wrote.
Influencing change
While Seymour says no federation is expected to be beyond reproach, he thinks sustainability initiatives need to come from a ‘genuine’ place to avoid criticisms from campaigners. Like Simms, he thinks it is equally important for athletes and sport to use their profile to influence change.
“I don’t mean that every sports organisation has to be perfect and be zero carbon and zero waste and all those kinds of things, but they have to have the right intention,” he says.
During his time as the MCC’s sustainability manager, the Lord’s cricket ground reduced its carbon footprint by 82 per cent – mainly by switching to 100-per-cent wind power – and reduced water consumption by 35 per cent.
Sustainability initiatives like this are likely to become the norm in the UK now that Sport England – the body that invests more than £300m ($364.9m) of public money in national sports federations – has indicated it will require sports to do far more to fight the climate crisis as a condition of receiving funding.
Government action
Nobody expects the industry to solve the climate crisis on its own. The race to ‘net zero’ also depends on action from governments and societies around the world. If they succeed in decarbonising areas such as transport, energy and food production, the sports sector, like others, will benefit. Seymour says: “There’s almost an assumption that you have to do everything to get to net zero but over the course of time – and we’ve already seen it in the UK – our electricity system is decarbonising. At some points it’s delivering well above 25 per-cent renewable energy, sometimes we’re pushing 50 per cent renewables, so even if you’ve done nothing at your stadium and your venue, your carbon footprint is decreasing.”
In this context, Fifa’s decision not to host the 2030 men’s World Cup entirely in Uruguay, 100 years after it first staged the event, has deprived it of a chance to bask in the glow of the country’s green credentials.
The South American nation has been hailed as a sustainability success story having rapidly overhauled its energy system. In 2007 it was still using fossil fuels for a third of its energy production but now runs on 98 per cent renewable electricity.
Hosting a demonstrably zero-carbon event in Uruguay would provide a storytelling platform for technology brands and appeal to sponsors looking to promote the strong environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) messages that have been proven to be important to younger consumers. It also follows that sports could upset, or even lose, their existing sponsors if they fail to abide by the same ESG standards these brands adhere to.
There’s almost an assumption that you have to do everything to get to net zero but over the course of time – and we’ve already seen it in the UK – our electricity system is decarbonising
– Russell Seymour, BASIS
High-carbon sponsors
There is now a serious question of whether there should still be a place in sport for the ‘high-carbon’ sponsors identified by the New Weather Institute in its Snow Thieves report.
The climate organisation, for one, is leading calls for UK legislators to follow the precedent applied to tobacco brands and end advertising by high carbon products. This is already partly the case in France which in 2022 became the first country to ban fossil fuel advertising altogether.
Simms takes an equally dim view of the sport’s industry’s tilt towards event hosting and sponsorship pacts with Middle Eastern petrostates, despite their protestations that they are using sport to diversify their economies.
He says: “Where both the oil majors and the petrostates are concerned, they know that they have to have a public relations game in which they are seen to be having some great initiatives, creating the impression of acting in good will on the issue […] “If you were to go along to any of the climate negotiations and see how the teams from the national delegations for major oil producers operate, it is about delay, deny, and disinform. It’s actually the same playbook that the tobacco industry used for decades across the fossil fuel industry – it is all about strategically pushing back the moment of the inevitable and, in pushing back the moment of the inevitable, the danger is that they actually push us over the climate cliff edge.”
For him, the final irony is that at some point in the near future, he believes it will not be possible to play sport outdoors in some of the Middle Eastern countries that are racing to host the industry’s crown-jewel events.
He points to a 2020 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which predicted that between now and 2070, allowing for different warming and population scenarios, between one and three billion people will be left outside climate conditions where livelihoods – let alone sport – will be viable.
“With the way that things are going, if there is no more realistic effort to hit our climate targets, the scenario we’re looking at is a world in a state of such upheaval, where large parts of the planet are no longer able to support even livelihoods, which means mass migration and populations on the move. And, at that point, sport is not going to be a major priority.”
