2023-04-16 08:00:36
Last August, el club Reading F.C., from the English second division, made an unprecedented decision. This modest but historic English team, whose ground is located in the eponymous city of Reading, an hour west of London, announced that their shirt this season would feature on the sleeves the temperature bar graph created by Ed Hawkins, a professor of Climate Sciences at the University of Reading. With vertical bars and hues ranging from blue to red, this is the best visual representation ever produced of the data demonstrating a accelerated increase in global average temperature in the last century and a half.
The news received moderate coverage in the British press until Reading, who are in the relegation zone after failing to win in the last five games, clashed with Manchester United in the FA Cup last January. He lost 3-1 and was eliminated by the Red Devils, but the match, which was broadcast in ‘prime time’, did serve to commentators and journalists look at the detail of the temperature bars and explain why Reading —who traditionally wears blue and white— wore those fine red lines on his sleeves[ER2] . Millions of fans then learned that the team had signed a series of agreements with the University of Reading to help publicize the need to act against climate change.
T-shirts made from plastic
Other initiatives are that the Reading shirt was made with recycled plastic bottles and that your stadium has a plan to implement renewable energy. One of the short-term priority goals is for fans to have public transportation available so they don’t have to go to the stadium in their private vehicles. “This is the start of a long journey,” said Tim Kilkpatrick, Reading FC’s commercial director. “We won’t be perfect, but like most of our fans in the stands, we can do better and help deliver a better future for our planet. ”.
In another of the most important leagues in Europe, the Italian league, a similar initiative has just emerged. He GEDI media group has launched an online petition so that, on the occasion of the Earth daywhich is held on April 22, all the captains of the elite ‘calcio’ men’s and women’s teams wear the hawkins bar chart on the bracelet. The ex-captain of Juventus and world champion Alessandro Del Pieroas well as the captain of AC Milan, David Calabriaor the striker of the Italian team Dominic Berardi have supported the campaign to collect signatures. Reasons for this are not lacking: Italy is one of the countries hardest hit in Europe by the hydrological droughtas well as by the increase in temperatures. In the last 50 years, thermometers in the transalpine country have risen on average 1.4 degrees, according to data from the Italian Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences (CNR-ISAC).
In many places, climate change is a threat to the practice of sport. A recent United Nations report explained that the global warming It already impacts sports entities and their followers, particularly due to extreme events such as heat waves and heavy rainfall that flood soccer fields. According to Barney Weston, director of the environmental non-governmental organization Football for Future, a quarter of the stadiums of the 92 top English clubs could be flooded in the next three decades.
The Barça, in AVE
In Spain, Betis is the first team of La Liga which has launched an initiative —’Forever Green’ or Siempre Verde, alluding to its colors[ER7] — to reduce its environmental footprint by rplant trees and promote public transport of his followers.
He has been followed by FC Barcelona, which this weekend has traveled by AVE to Madrid to face Getafe. In fact, as long as the railway infrastructure and the competitive schedule allow it, the Barça club will travel by train and not by plane as it used to do up to now. This has been explained by the club itself. The idea, they say, is that this is a trend that is progressively incorporated into travel habits for the sake of sustainability.
But in general, elite sports, especially those like soccer that encourage hundreds of millions of fans to go to the stadiums every weekend, have a pending subject in the fight against climate change. So far the initiatives are too timid.
The laughs of Mbappé and Galtier
The UN has urged athletes to “use sport as a unifying tool to create climate awareness and encourage actions by the international community”, but the stars sometimes make the news for doing the opposite. A few months ago, the embarrassing image of the French star went around the world Kylian Mbappe laughing out loud with the then PSG coach Christophe Galtier because when he was asked about the French railway company’s proposal to prepare trains for the team’s travel, he mocked the reporter saying that they were going to “travel with a vehicle with sail”. They later apologized, but have not taken any concrete action to show that they truly have sincere concern for the planet.
Lionel Messi, Mbappé’s teammate, was also criticized by the excessive use of his private plane. He made no less than 52 trips between June and August of last year. In this regard, the French environmental parties have just failed in their bill to ban private flights in the country.
Pollution from the World Cup in Qatar
The FIFA He doesn’t seem to be up to the job either. Soccer ‘s biggest body has promised the World Cup in Qatar would be carbon neutral , a claim that has been denied by investigators who have accused FIFA of spreading false news . “It is very misleading to say that the World Cup was carbon neutral,” criticized Mike Berners-Lee, an expert at the lancaster universitywho has made a reliable calculation of the emissions generated by the event with other experts, since the FIFA event was plagued with inaccuracies and errorssuch as counting only the CO2 of the outbound flights of the followers.
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According to his estimates, the event emitted 10 million tons of CO2, three times more than the 3.6 that Qatar promised and more than four times what the World Cups in Brazil and Russia issued. The organizers of the next World Cup, which will be held in 2026 in the United States, Canada and Mexico, have committed to making the event neutral in emissions.
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