White elephants and green lies

Gianni Infantino boasted that the World Cup in Qatar would be the greenest ever. It turns out that the 2022 tournament was the dirtiest in history.

By Philippe Auclair, Andy Brown, Jack Kerr, Sam Kunti and Steve Menary

Gianni Infantino had promised this would be the greenest World Cup ever. "[We] aim to make the Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022 carbon neutral”, he said in a video posted on Fifa's YouTube channel on 5 June 2022, to coincide with World Environment Day. As a signatory of the UN Convention on Climate Change’s Sports for Climate Action Framework, whose stated ambition is to achieve Net Zero by 2040, world football's governing body would actually be ahead of that timetable if it managed to organise the first-ever carbon neutral global sports event. According to Fifa's assessment, Qatar had “pledged to mitigate and offset all of the tournament’s greenhouse gas emissions, while advancing low-carbon solutions in Qatar and the region.”

How this could be achieved was far from obvious. Preliminary analysis done by carbon finance consultancy SouthPole (*) at the behest of the organisers and Fifa estimated that the Qatar World Cup would generate a total of 3.6 megatons of CO2, 1.5 megatons more than Russia 2018, the equivalent of the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by Iceland over a whole year. This took into account the emissions generated by the construction of the huge infrastructure needed to host the tournament, which included the building from scratch of seven stadiums and the renovation of an eighth.

Not everyone was convinced by S...

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