World Cup 2022: The problem with Qatar’s ‘carbon neutral’ promise

The first “carbon neutral” World Cup was built from scratch by what one expert calls “a big oil company dressed up as a country.”

It will bring a million fans via airplane to a petrostate that emits more carbon per capita than any other nation on Earth.

Qatar, in preparing the 2022 World Cup, has genuinely impressed some climate scientists and activists with eco-friendly innovations. But its grand proclamations of sustainability and climate neutrality have been dogged by criticism of its carbon accounting and, most of all, by these inherent contradictions.

The tournament itself, organizers say, will have a net-zero impact on the environment — “though quite how this accounts for the hydrocarbon-soaked wealth that has made the show possible is unspoken,” David Goldblatt, a British author and academic, wrote in a 2020 report on sport and climate change.

Less than a century ago, Qatar was a tiny peninsular desert home to 20,000 people. The discovery of onshore oil, and later the world’s largest natural gas field just offshore, has transformed the former British protectorate into a bustling international hub. The liquified gas produced at Ras Laffan refineries and sold to the world has blessed Qatar with almost limitless riches — just as the world has begun to worry that gas, oil and coal are destroying the planet.

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Enabled and emboldened by those riches, Qatar bid for and controversially won the right to host the 2022 World Cup. It spent an estimated $200 billion on the construction of roads, hotels and other infrastructure to remake Doha, its capital, into a modern city capable of welcoming a million soccer fans from around the globe. It now stands ready to stage an extravagant tournament that will burnish the fossil-fueled nation’s international image.

And yet, last decade, organizers also promised that the World Cup would be “carbon neutral” — meaning that any greenhouse gas emissions associated with it will be canceled out by the World Cup-funded removal of carbon from the atmosphere.

It was an ambitious, unprecedented and commendable commitment — and one that organizers say they’re “on track” to fulfill.

But they’ve been accused of “greenwashing” and grossly understating the 2022 World Cup’s true environmental impact.

“The event will have a large carbon footprint,” Carbon Market Watch researchers wrote in a May report commissioned by climate action advocates. “And the findings of this report suggest that the ‘carbon neutrality’ claim is not credible.”

Solar panels sit in front of Khalifa International Stadium, also known as Qatar’s National and oldest Stadium, which will host matches during FIFA World Cup 2022, in Doha, Qatar, Saturday, Oct. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
Could Qatar actually ‘offset’ World Cup emissions?
To make good on its promise, Qatar’s World Cup organizing task force, the Supreme Committee, hired a team of foreign experts that industry insiders describe as “great” and “top-notch.” Their first task, as it is for any sporting organization interested in sustainability, was to devise a plan for emission reduction. They have used recycled and recyclable materials to build stadiums, one of which is fully demountable. They have planted thousands of trees and hundreds of thousands of shrubs, and created the world’s largest turf farm. An ultramodern metro system will mitigate the footprint of travel within Doha, as will “nearly 800 new electric buses,” the Supreme Committee says.

“They’ve done some really interesting things,” says Maddy Orr, a Canadian climate advocate and founder of the Sport Ecology Group. “They’ve done a phenomenal job of really being crafty with how they’re building the facilities.”

In 2021 — and in collaboration with a Swiss carbon consultancy and Qatari project management firm — the Supreme Committee released its pre-World Cup greenhouse gas accounting report. It estimated that construction, fan and participant travel, and all other World Cup-related activities would spew 3.63 megatonnes of carbon dioxide and equivalent gasses (CO2e) into the atmosphere. (Each of the three previous men’s World Cups, by comparison, calculated a CO2e footprint under 3 MT.)

The standard practice, then, to achieve “carbon neutrality” is to “offset” those emissions by investing in “carbon capture” projects. For every tonne of CO2e emitted, the Supreme Committee would pay for a “carbon credit” that would, in theory, take one tonne out of the atmosphere — a segment of forest, for example, that would soak up carbon.

But the problem with this plan, experts say, is twofold: The 3.63 megatonnes are a significant underestimate; and the carbon credits purchased so far are “outdated and uncertain” — in other words, they likely won’t have the impact they purport to.

The 3.63 MT — which come primarily from travel (51.7%) and infrastructure construction and operation (24.2%) — do not include most of the $200 billion worth of construction, which technically falls outside the Supreme Committee’s remit. And it does not even include most of the emissions associated with stadium construction. World Cup organizers have only taken responsibility for a fraction of it, equivalent to the fraction of the stadiums’ lifespan during which FIFA and the Supreme Committee will operate them — because, the Committee argues, they’ve been “built to serve the community before and after the World Cup has ended.” But experts point out that this “is all kinds of problematic”; the World Cup might only account for 1% of the lifespan, but it’s almost 100% of the reason the stadiums have been built.

“In our estimation,” Carbon Market Watch researchers wrote, “the total footprint of the [six] permanent stadiums constructed for the World Cup might be underestimated by a factor of eight” — and the total footprint of the World Cup, therefore, might be upward of 5 MT, the biggest for any sporting event ever.

The offsets, meanwhile, have so far been investments in wind farms and other “grid-connected renewable energy projects” that, the researchers said, “are likely to happen regardless of whether they can sell carbon credits.” In other words, the carbon that the Qataris are supposedly removing from the atmosphere would probably be removed anyway, without their funding.