It’s Super Bowl Weekend – Yay! But What Are Sports Doing About Mega-Event Emissions? – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Last Updated on: 9th February 2025, 11:58 am

Advertisers pay around $8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad slot, and the NFL makes hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from the Super Bowl. They’re awfully entertaining, of course, but we often overlook the environmental impact of the Super Bowl as a mega-event in all the hoopla.

In 2021, Super Bowl ads emitted as much CO2 as 100,000 US residents, totaling around 2 million tons. From the energy to power stadiums, to the travel expenditure and food waste, the Super Bowl has a substantial footprint associated with it.

Wait, you say: the NFL Green environmental program works to mitigate the environmental impact of the NFL’s major events, right? It is designed to create a green legacy in each community that hosts Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, and the NFL Draft. But, sorry, folks. Instead of real attempts to reduce emissions, these NFL events are little more than feel-good media splashes with NFL sponsors, local host committees, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. The NFL boasts that it’s helping host city New Orleans by donating materials and food, improving recycling, hosting zero waste events, tracking and reducing carbon, and looking forward to future Super Bowls where they can do more.

Yup, that last phrase is important — the NFL leaves the difficult work of decarbonization for next year, or the year after that…

It’s unfortunate that the NFL, with its millions of fans, isn’t a model for sustainability; instead, it turns the responsibility for emissions over to its fans. “There are simple steps you can take to help make Super Bowl LIX more sustainable!” its sustainability website reads.

The majority of the GHG emissions at the Super Bowl are linked to the Scope 3 category. The team owners would have to enforce strict guidelines with partners and stakeholders as a key to success in attaining carbon neutrality. Two-thirds of Scope 3 — half of total emissions — come from the use of products, so reducing Scope 3 emissions would primarily be achieved by changing products or by significantly altering demand dynamics.

Otherwise, it’s greenwashing, or as it’s come to be known in this context, sportswashing.

The Super Bowl as a Mega-Event

Sporting events play an important role in today’s social life — they are a fun pastime for the public, invigorate the local economy, facilitate tourism, and improve regional development. These benefits, though, need to be balanced by their environmental impacts, especially digging deep into mega-event destinations.

There is a real lack of understanding and few practical examples of how these organizations, especially in team sports, holistically assess and reduce their climate impacts to achieve carbon neutrality. Amateur and professional sport practices are associated with elevated carbon footprints compared to average values in the general population. Individual sports producing more emissions than team/racket sports. Playing golf, diving, and surfing generate over six times the emissions as the lowest sports. Why? You know: mostly due to the travel involved. An iconic 2018 study revealed that environmental consciousness significantly reduced carbon footprint in individual sports but not in team/racket and nature sports, supporting the existence of an environmental value-action gap.

Numerous sporting governing bodies and associations worldwide have made pledges to report and reduce carbon emissions associated with sporting events. Some proposed sports climate policies, such as reducing spectator attendance, though, may hurt the future of sport itself and accomplish trivial results in the context of global emissions.

Are owners and local governing bodies that want a successful sports complex willing to step back, do a critical assessment, and reflect on how their mega-events interact with the environment?

And there’s the fact that mega-events are sportswashed by fossil fuel companies seeking to improve their public images. By placing their corporate names in prominent places within sports marketing, Big Oil presents a picture of the world in the midst of a climate crossroads.

Minimizing environmental impacts of sport events has become a major challenge for Super Bowl and other mega-event organizers. The Event Industry Council, a group of event industry leaders from around the world which recognize the importance of sustainability and support it, defines four main guidelines to create a sustainable event:

• Share responsibility among Stakeholders for implementing and communicating sustainable practices to their stakeholders.
• Implement basic environmental practices (resource conservation, including waste management, carbon emissions reduction and management, supply chain management, ethical consumption, and biodiversity conservation).
• Consider social impacts (universal human rights, community impact, labor practices, respect for culture, safety and security, and health and wellbeing).
• Combine sustainable events with thriving economic practices (collaboration and partnerships, local support particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), stakeholder engagement, equal economic impact, transparency, and responsible governance).

Climate Change Giveth, & Climate Change Taketh Away

Certainly there are many contributions sport can make to sustainable development and combating climate change within international development policy and among specific advocates. Interestingly, research has revealed that sport and climate change are associated in a bidirectional way — they are influencing each other. The potential environmental impacts of sporting events are influenced by numerous variables, including the type of sport, event size, location, and duration. Even the location of key infrastructure, such as stadiums, airports, and facility establishments, can have substantial environmental effects. Environmental strategies of the largest sport events encompass aspects such as resource management, infrastructure, energy usage, and climate neutrality.

The International Day of Sport for Development and Peace (IDSDP), organized and initiated by the United Nations (UN), takes place annually on April 6th to “recognize the positive role sport and physical activity play in communities and in people’s lives across the globe” and to “strengthen social ties and promote sustainable development and peace.” A recent theme of the IDSP was “securing a sustainable and peaceful future for all,” (United Nations, 2022a, para. 4) with an emphasis on sport’s ability to:

“display leadership, to take responsibility for its carbon footprint, engage in a climate neutral journey, incentivize action beyond the sporting sector, and play a major role in amplifying awareness among its billions of spectators, facilitators, and participants at all levels.”

Sporting enterprises do have choices that can make a difference: they can demonstrate how they are an effective model for reducing carbon emissions, and the future of global sports could be tied to the climate crisis itself.