Although the organization of Qatar World Cup has tried to pass it off as the most sustainable in history, a report by the NGO Carbon Market Watch warned a few months ago about the dubious projects that the organization has financed, through carbon credits, who are part of those efforts to pass for “green”.
This type of controversies falls within what has been called greenwashing, green wash o ecolaundering Bruno Giambeluca, coordinator of the Climate and Energy campaign of Greenpeaceexplained in an interview with El Espectador that the greenwashing It is a kind of “marketing campaign that seeks to make it appear that you are addressing a problem or taking charge of an environmental situation when in reality you are not solving a fundamental problem. It can be applied to the World Cup, but also to many things that happen on a day-to-day basis: the use of plastics by car companies that want to tell us that a car is sustainable when it actually uses fossil fuels, for example”.
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But these controversial projects are not the only thing that worries experts. The forecasts of Energy Monitorwhich since 2010 analyzes the emissions of the World Cups and the Olympic Games, point out that the Qatar World Cup will have the highest environmental footprint, even exceeding emissions from Olympic Games summer Río in 2016, considered until now the least sustainable in history.
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This conclusion about the Rio Games had also been reached by the study ‘An evaluation of the sustainability of the Olympic Games’, published in the journal Nature last year. Following Rio would be the Tokyo games with 3 million tons of CO2, although the Energy Monitor puts the London Olympics in third place with 3.4 million tons.
According to Energy Monitor analyses, while the Rio Games emitted 3.6 million tons of CO2, It is estimated that the World Cup in Qatar will emit 3.63 million tons of CO2.
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Half of these emissions They are due to the more than 150 flights that would take tourists to the World Cup; 25% to infrastructure construction (such as eight stadiums) and more than 20% to accommodation.
However, according to Carbon Market Watch, the 3.6 million tons of carbon dioxide may be below the actual levels of emissions from this soccer match. Calculations by this NGO estimate that emissions from Qatar could reach 5 million tons.
