The Qatar World Cup is failing to live up to promises on reducing its carbon footprint

The British newspaper The Guardian revealed the false claims of the World Cup organizers in Qatar who claimed that the tournament, which includes 32 teams, will be the first “carbon neutral” World Cup, meaning any emissions would be limited and equivalent.

Carbon Market Watch, a not-for-profit organization which works closely with the European Union, has examined the organizers’ plans and says projected emissions have likely been underreported, with the carbon footprint created from building seven new stadiums of particular concern.

“It would be great to see the climate impact of Fifa World Cups being drastically reduced but the carbon neutrality claim that is being made is simply not credible,” said Gilles Dufrasne of Carbon Market Watch.

“Despite a lack of transparency, the evidence suggests that the emissions from this World Cup will be considerably higher than expected by the organizers, and the carbon credits being purchased to offset these emissions are unlikely to have a sufficiently positive impact on the climate.”

Central to Carbon Market Watch’s complaint is its calculation that carbon emissions created by the new stadiums could be as much as eight times higher than the figures contained in Qatar’s analysis.

The Carbon Market Watch report claims the hosts have made a calculation which spreads a stadium’s carbon footprint over its entire lifetime, something the report describes as “problematic”.

The organization also drew further criticisms related to plans to absorb emissions with a large-scale “tree and turf nursery”.

The Carbon Market Watch report claims this idea is “not credible” because any absorption is “unlikely to be permanent in these artificial and vulnerable green spaces”.

It also questions the carbon credit system Qatar plans to use to offset remaining emissions at the end of the event.

The Carbon Market Watch’s criticism was not the only criticism that exposed Qatar’s failure to live up to its promises, as Wall St magazine issued a previous rating that confirmed the country with the highest CO2 emissions per capita is Qatar.

According to the magazine, Qatar had a higher amount of CO2 emissions per metric tons per capita than any country on the list in 2019 and 2020.

Energy production, total primary energy supply, final electricity consumption, and CO2 emissions have doubled, by at least 533% since 1990 in Qatar, which has a population of only about 2.9 million people.

On the other hand, Qatar faces several accusations in the field of environment, as environmental organizations questioned the feasibility of the technology of the project that Qatar boasts of, which is the project to cool the stadiums of the World Cup 2022 World Cup.

These organizations confirmed that the technology that Doha uses to reduce temperatures in its stadiums is harmful to the environment.

Environmental activists have said that conditioners that need a lot of energy, desalination of water and disposable plastic, cannot really be environmentally friendly, as well as gas emissions from stadium cooling.

Earlier Zeina Al-Hajj, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Bureau at Greenpeace Environmental Organization, warned that ” air conditioning around stadiums is not environmentally friendly, but increases emissions”.

Greenpeace says that the cooling system used in the seven stadiums that will host the World Cup could “become more sustainable” if it is powered by solar energy, but according to Al-Hajj, “there is none of this in Qatar.”

Engineering professor Saud Abdul-Ghani, who oversaw the development of the cooling technology, admitted that a “large amount of energy” was used and that the system would rely on polluting diesel generators as a backup in the event of a power outages.

He pointed out that “reducing the temperatures in the stadium leads to only a fifth of the emissions resulting from cooling the lobbies of similar airports in terms of pilgrimage.”

Finally, despite FIFA’s awareness of the risks posed by mega events to the economy, the natural environment, people and societies, but this time it chose to stand by Doha in order to identify with it when it gave it the honour of organizing the World Cup, as the International Football Association opposed the analysis of Carbon Market Watch, arguing that it is not appropriate to consider the stadium emissions based solely on their use at the World Cup and that “detailed plans and business models” for stadium use after the tournament exist.