Why Do Team Sports Contribute More Climate Emissions Than Individual Sports? – CleanTechnica

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On this weekend of the US Super Bowl, we were eating chili, comparing quarterback stats, listening to some Kendrick Lamar, and debating the strategies of the Eagles vs. the Chiefs. What most of us likely weren’t doing was taking time out of the fun to consider the climate impacts that the NFL and other team sports have on our world.

The UN has called on professional team sports to take systematic measures to reduce their carbon emissions and reach climate neutrality by 2050.

Sport across the globe is part of everyday social, economic, and environmental realities. It’s also caught up in the most pressing challenge of our times: the existential crisis of climate change. While we appreciate sport as a revered and vital component of leisure, we also must acknowledge that the global sports industry, which is estimated to be worth around $600 billion, is responsible for approximately 350 million tons of CO2e.

If aware of these enormous emissions, more people across the world, regardless of their geographical location and social background, might demand that sports teams rise up to become a powerful tool for systemic change. Different sports can raise awareness about the climate crisis by committing to be a change agent. They can champion high-impact solutions for reducing emissions. They can promote climate awareness and action among the millions of their fans.

How A Changing Climate Affects Athletes and Physical Activity

Climate change has many health effects. Each of these health effects can change the way we participate in and experience sports due to increases of health-related risks for athletes of all skill levels:

• Direct consequences caused by extreme temperature and other extreme weather events — increasing risks due to heatwaves, thunderstorms, floods, lightning, ultraviolet radiation;
• Indirect consequences as a result of climate-induced changes to our ecosystem — due to increased air pollution by ozone, higher exposures to allergens, and increasing risks of infection by viruses and bacteria and the associated vectors and reservoir organisms;
• Ecosystem-mediated — with increased infectious disease risk or reduced food yield; and,
• Specific domains — health behaviors, health systems resilience, mortality risk, and stress-related disorders.

MIT researchers came up with the concept of “outdoor days,” which are the number days per year in a given location when the temperature is not too hot or too cold to enjoy normal outdoor activities, such as going for a walk, playing sports, working in the garden, or dining outdoors. They compared the outcomes for different parts of the US, dividing the country into nine climatic regions.

Some states, especially Florida and other parts of the Southeast, should see a significant drop in outdoor days, while some, especially in the Northwest, should see a slight increase. For much of the country, there will be little overall change in the total number of annual outdoor days, the study found, but the seasonal pattern of those days could change significantly. While most parts of the country now see the most outdoor days in summertime, that will shift as summers get hotter, and spring and fall will become the preferred seasons for outdoor activity.

Scorching temperatures, smoke-filled skies, and rain-soaked days threaten some of the world’s favorite pastimes and the athletes who participate in them, from grassroots to the professionals. Anthropogenic climate change consequences are becoming a barrier to sport and PA practices — it makes sense that air pollution and pollution alerts in the media are negatively associated with physical activity, including recreational and occupational physical activity.

Home runs: Did you know that the increase in pro home runs has a direct relation to climate change? Researchers at Dartmouth College have determined that human-caused warming led to 58 extra home runs each Major League Baseball (MLB) season for the last decade; they predict hundreds more as warming continues. It’s because, as the temperature rises, air resistance goes down. The Dartmouth team used observations from 100,000 MLB games and 240,000 individual batted balls to show that higher temperatures substantially increase home runs. “Our results highlight the myriad ways that a warmer planet will restructure our lives, livelihoods, and recreation, some quantifiable and easily adapted to, as shown here, many others, not,” they conclude.

Wave goodbye to skiing? Since 1949, nearly 80% of weather stations across North America have recorded an increase in winter precipitation falling as rain instead of snow, according to the National Environmental Education Foundation. Ski resorts typically need 100 days of open snow days to keep from profitability collapse. Research from the University of Waterloo estimates that only one of the 21 cities that hosted the Winter Olympics in the past 100 years will have a climate suitable for skiing and snowboarding by the end of the century.

Sponsors need to clean up their acts: A 2024 New Weather Institute report, Dirty Money — How Fossil Fuel Sponsors are Polluting Sport, reveals that major oil and gas companies are spending at least $5.6 billion on the sponsorship of global sport across 205 active deals. The high-profile sports with the most deals are football, motor sports, rugby union, and golf, with key sponsors including Aramco ($1.3 billion), Shell ($470 million), TotalEnergies ($340 million), and petrochemicals giant Ineos ($777 million). This report shows the huge scale of the issue and the urgent need to clean up the sports sponsorship world.

Heat at midnight? The women’s marathon at the 2019 World Athletics Championship in Qatar started near midnight to avoid the worst of the day’s heat, but only 60% of starters finished the course.

Bike ’til you drop: During the Tour de France, traditionally held in July, organizers faced with cyclists suffering heatstroke spray roads with water to reduce temperatures — hardly an option for recreational riders. And some hazards no money can protect from. At least one player in the 2020 Australian Open tennis championship retired after breathing wildfire smoke.

Plants help athletes to shine: Some athletes are fighting back with their diets. Tom Brady, Lewis Hamilton, Chris Paul, and Serena Williams are some of the most famous athletes who have vegan or flexitarian lives.

Team Sports and Air Travel

Team sports especially have an enormous carbon footprint which affects athletes, fans, and communities. To narrow this down slightly, let’s consider transportation. The challenge in using mega-event opportunities is to align the transportation requirements for hosting a world-class event with the metropolitan vision, using mega-events as a tool for desired changes. Indeed, preparations can serve as tangible legacies that can improve urban transportation by encouraging a change in people’s travel habits.

Yet sustainable transport is defined as one of sports’ main challenges; however, different approaches, simplified models, and numerous approximations highlight that it has not been treated as a main focus in the tourism destination and event management.

Football (US soccer) is the most popular sport globally, with an estimated 3.5 billion fan base. The estimated average annual carbon footprint of English Premier League football player is 29 tons CO2, representing almost 3 times the annual carbon footprint of British adults. The sport generates a range of negative environmental impacts, such as climate change, due to an extensive amount of travel involved.

The 2022 FIFA World Cup surpassed the last four World Cup tournaments in carbon emissions, reaching approximately 3.6 million tCO2e. This marked a 68% increase in CO2 emissions compared to the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Yet soccer has one of the lowest carbon footprints in sport, along with gym sessions and tennis, according to a comprehensive 2018 study from Germany. Over half that total was due to jet travel by spectators, players, and officials.

Given the disproportionally high share of air travel in the total carbon footprint of club travel, this transportation mode represents another major mitigation opportunity. Playing games at neutral stadiums has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of clubs — but how would owners cull out the benefits of ticket and concession sales? It’s another capitalism conundrum that postpones our transition to a sustainable world.