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‘Greening’ the 2010 FIFA World Cup: Environmental sustainability and the mega-event in South Africa
Event greening of major spectacles such as the Olympics, World Cups and large international conferences are increasingly common. The 2010 South African World Cup sought to develop a ‘Green Goal 2010’ programme that would mitigate some of the environmental impacts of the event, as well as secure a positive social, economic, and environmental legacy. Whilst the content of the Green Goal programmes varied between host cities, some innovative and significant projects were implemented, ranging from waste management and recycling, to biodiversity protection and city beautification, to public transport upgrades and energy efficiency measures at the stadiums. In the broader context of the most carbon intensive World Cup ever, however, such mitigation efforts were relatively piecemeal. The greatest opportunity the World Cup provided was for its visibility, branding and communication potential to catalyse greater environmental awareness and a stronger commitment to ecological modernisation. Due to lack of coordination and national leadership, this opportunity was largely missed. The article concludes by recommending a number of core lessons, as well as some further opportunities, that can be taken from the South African 2010 experience.
KEY WORDS: FIFA World Cup, South Africa, Green Goal 2010, ecological modernisation, mega-event
CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS: Dr Carl Death, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Penglais, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3FE, Wales, UK. Tel. +44 1970 621560 Fax. +44 1970 622709 Email.
As environmental concerns and issues of sustainability acquire increasing resonance among governments and societies worldwide, the drive to ‘green’ organisations, places, and even specific events has increased in pace (Mol, 2010: 510-1). Sporting ‘mega-events’ such as the FIFA World Cup Finals and the Olympic Games have been part of this trend, and the 2006 World Cup in Germany and the 2008 Beijing Olympics both captured headlines for their ‘greening’ initiatives, as well as for their sporting and economic dimensions (Black and van der Westhuizen, 2004; Collins et al, 2009: 830; Mitchell, 2007; Schmidt, 2006). The particular context of the 2010 FIFA South African World Cup Finals, where the majority of international fans arrived by air, to a country with a poor internal public transport infrastructure and an exceptionally carbon-intensive and coal-reliant economy, meant the challenge of greening the event was a significant one. To this end the ‘Green Goal 2010’ programme, inspired by the 2006 World Cup in Germany, sought to create a positive legacy from the tournament across the three pillars of sustainable development: social, economic and environmental. This greening campaign was bound up with the broader vision of using the World Cup to showcase a modern, successful, competent and inspirational South Africa, at the heart of the African Renaissance. ‘We want to show that Africa’s time has come’, President Thabo Mbeki proclaimed in 2003 (Desai and Verhad, 2010: 154). Whilst the tournament was broadly acclaimed as a successful and well-organised event, however, it is doubtful whether it will have a green legacy to match.
This article asks two central questions. First, how did FIFA and the South African organisers attempt to green the 2010 World Cup? Secondly, how successful was this greening campaign, and what was its political legacy? Analyses of environmental greening initiatives have tended to be the preserve of natural scientists, engineers, planners and economists; however the focus of this article is on the politics of the greening campaign. As such it asks what the Green Goal 2010 programme reveals about the political rationalities underpinning sustainability initiatives in South Africa, particularly at mega-events like the World Cup.
The research is based upon analysis of the forests of documents (project reports, planning proposals, press releases, workshops, etc) produced around the Green Goal 2010 initiative, much of it available online, and this was supplemented with face-to-face interviews, email and telephone communications with organisers, and some first-hand user experiences of the greening projects during July 2010. It is structured in four parts. The next section situates the research in relation to the existing literature on mega-events, sport and sustainability, and argues that such mega-events can, and frequently are, conceptualised as tools for the sustainable development or ecological modernisation of the host country or city. The second section describes the Green Goal 2010 programme in more detail, tabulating 127 projects in South Africa according to their location and focus. The third section highlights the contrast between these greening projects and some of the more structural features of unsustainable development related to hosting the World Cup in South Africa, and presents some of the widespread critiques of the greening projects as well as the World Cup itself. The fourth section argues, however, that rather than simply trying to mitigate the adverse environmental effects of the event itself, the governmental rationality underpinning the greening campaign was an exemplary one which aimed to communicate, popularise and mainstream norms of sustainability among the broader South African and World Cup-watching population. This argument builds upon recent analyses of mega-events as relying more upon symbolic and exemplary political logics than instrumental or functional rationalities (Death, 2010; 2011). From this perspective the biggest disappointment of the greening programme was that it failed to produce a coordinated and well-marketed communications strategy that could take advantage of the mega-event potential. I conclude that whilst such a rationality of government increasingly underpins mega-event greening plans, the Green Goal 2010 programme in South Africa fell short on a number of counts. Future attempts to use mega-events as catalysts for broader greening initiatives will require learning some of the lessons of these missed opportunities.
1. Mega-events, sport and sustainability
Large sporting events such as the Olympics and football World Cup Finals have attracted academic attention as ‘mega-events’ (Hiller, 1998; Roche, 2000); one-off, prominent events with a large social, economic and political ‘footprint’ or impact for the hosts, which attract a global media audience, and have lasting legacies in a range of areas. Much of the literature on mega-events has focussed on their role in development, in stimulating urban renewal and restructuring, as economic boosts for construction, consumption and tourism, or their symbolic potential for nation or place-branding (Black, 2007; Cornelissen, 2004; Cornelissen and Swart, 2006; Horne and Manzenreiter, 2006).
One branch of this literature has focussed on the environmental impacts of mega-events, for as Arthur Mol points out, as ‘high profile and very visible happenings that attract worldwide attention, organizers can hardly ignore common norms on environment, democracy, transparency and equality in the route towards such an event’ (2010: 511). The South Africa Greening 2010 Framework noted that ‘the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympic Games was the first major sporting event to take up the sustainability challenge and attempt to host a “green games”’ (DEAT, 2009: 8). Since then most major events have included some form of environmental impact assessment, with the environmental dimensions of the 2000 Sidney Olympics, the 2006 Germany World Cup, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the 2012 London Olympics all making headlines (Mol, 2010: 511; Schmidt, 2006). The unsuccessful Cape Town Olympic bid of 2004 was the first to include a Strategic Environmental Assessment as part of the bid, and this has now become a standard requirement for Olympic bids (DEAT, 2009: 8; Hiller, 1998: 55). Other major mega-events have also included greening programmes, such as the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, which was an important milestone in developing South African experiences in event greening, carbon off-setting, and waste minimisation (DEAT, 2009: 9; Death, 2010: 108-110; UNDP, no date).
There are two key dimensions of event greening: the mitigation of the direct environmental impact or ‘footprint’ of the event (including the carbon dioxide emissions, as well as waste created, water and energy used, biodiversity threatened, etc), and the potential of the event to catalyse a broader societal and political shift toward more sustainable pathways (Cape Town, 2008: 6; Interview, Gerrans, 2010).[1] In terms of the former the literature has been dominated by technical and scientific attempts to calculate baseline emissions and event footprints, or input-output modelling of events (Collins et al, 2009; DEAT, no date; Econ Pöyry, 2009; UEMP, 2010). In terms of the latter, Arthur Mol’s recent description of the Beijing Olympics as a ‘sustainability attractor’ argued that mega-events can work to inspire, facilitate and focus a wide range of environmental initiatives, and concluded that the event ‘further strengthened and articulated existing sustainable development tendencies in China’ (2010: 523). As such these mega-events can function as ‘catalysts’ for further multilateral environmental cooperation (Mitchell, 2007: 52), or as policy tools for strategies of ecological modernisation (Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000; Mol, 2010: 513). From this perspective, a successful greening programme reinforces the role of mega-events as expressions of modernity; highly symbolic performances of the cosmopolitan and environmentally responsible character of the host nation and/or city (Roche, 2000; van der Westhuizen, 2007).
In this article I consider both these dimensions of event greening at the World Cup: the mitigation of environmental ‘bads’, and the catalytic potential of the mega-event in terms of sustainable development and ecological modernisation. From the perspective of theorists of ecological modernisation like Mol it is argued that such mega-events have the potential to act as attractors or nodes for more sustainable policies, ‘pockets of ordering [which] involve various networks, flows and governance mechanisms and produce similar shapes and “results” at very different places and scales across the world’ (Mol, 2010: 513). From a governmentality perspective (see Death 2010; 2011) such mega-events could be conceived as techniques of ‘government at a distance’ whereby rule is exercised through ‘establishing relays between the calculations of authorities and the aspirations of free citizens’ (Rose, 1999: 49). Such techniques of government leave the content or meaning of sustainability quite open and mutable, hence the twin questions motivating this research: how was the greening of the World Cup attempted (what form did it take), and how successful or effective was it?
The 2010 South African FIFA World Cup was widely praised for confounding sceptics, proving that the African continent has the capacity to host world class events, and showcasing the best of the host country’s hospitality, natural beauty, globalised cities and citizens, and modern infrastructure. Yet the degree to which the greening programmes constituted a significant part of this success is less clear. The next section assesses the content, character and rationale of the Green Goal 2010 initiatives, and questions whether they achieved either a significant mitigation of the environmental impacts of the mega-event, or contributed toward the communication and institutionalisation of ecological modernisation in South Africa.
2. Green Goal 2010 in South Africa
The decision that the 2010 FIFA World Cup would be held in South Africa was made in 2004. There followed a lengthy preparatory process of building and renovating venues, upgrading public transport, airports, and infrastructure, readying the tourism industry, and marketing the country and event – as well as the team’s preparations on the football field. Part of this organisational process was the development of a greening programme, although it occupied a relatively low profile and did not command a separate budget stream. Host cities signed a FIFA agreement in 2006 that included a broadly worded commitment to environmental protection, in which they undertook to carry out their role ‘in a manner which embraces the concept of sustainable development that complies with applicable environmental legislation and serves to promote the protection of the environment’ (Mander and Roberts, 2010). This commitment was eventually embodied in the Green Goal 2010 programme, inspired by the example of the 2006 German World Cup Green Goal initiative, which had been sponsored by UNEP and claimed to have delivered a carbon-neutral event as well as substantial water, energy, transport and waste efficiencies (UNEP, 2005). The Green Goal 2010 programme also sought to mitigate the adverse environmental impacts of the tournament, but placed a greater emphasis on using the greening initiatives to inspire and promote sustainability in the country, and secure a positive environmental, social and economic legacy for the tournament (DEAT, no date: 86).
The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT)[2] produced a National Greening 2010 Framework which, in the words of the then-Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk, formed ‘an integral part of our response to adapting, as a nation, to the challenges of global climate change and more sustainable growth and development’ (DEAT, 2009: 3). It detailed six focus areas of waste, energy, transport, water, biodiversity and responsible tourism, together with four cross-cutting themes of carbon off-setting and emissions reductions, sustainable procurement, job creation, and communication and outreach. The envisaged outcomes of the strategy were to reduce the environmental footprint of the event, to leave a green legacy, to communicate the importance of environmental management to citizens, and to reduce carbon emissions (DEAT, 2009: 11). Although this framework arrived rather late in the preparatory process, and had a limited impact on the programmes of the host cities, it did set out a comprehensive and ambitious vision for the greening of major international events.
The concept of the Green Goal initiative was developed by the German World Cup hosts in 2006. Their widely praised programme had proclaimed the event to be carbon neutral through large accredited emissions offset projects in India and South Africa, as well as impressive local successes in waste minimisation and getting people out of cars and onto public transport, bikes and pedestrianised routes (Schmidt, 2006; UNEP, 2005). The context of the 2010 South African World Cup was very different however. First, social and economic development was a greater priority than environmental mitigation. Sustainability assessments for the new stadiums explicitly highlighted the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental dimensions (UEMP, 2010: 5), and hopes were high that the tournament would deliver jobs, infrastructure improvements, and a tourism boost. Secondly, it was recognised from an early stage that the carbon dioxide emissions of the 2010 World Cup would vastly exceed those of the 2006 World Cup. Consultants estimated the tournament would produce 896,661 tCO2e, more than eight times the estimated emissions of the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, with an additional 1,856,589 tCO2e contributed by international air travel (Econ Pöyry, 2009: 5). This increase was largely due to the absence of high speed rail links in South Africa (meaning most visitors flew between host cities), the anticipated increased time spent in rented accommodation (as international tourists stayed for longer), and the need to construct five new stadiums and renovate five others (Econ Pöyry, 2009: 5-6). The cost for off-setting this carbon footprint has been variously estimated at between $5.4 and $12 million, even excluding the emissions from air travel, and whereas in 2006 FIFA contributed to the costs of off-setting the tournament, in 2010 there was little enthusiasm for off-setting the national carbon footprint (Cape Town, 2009: 17; Cartwright, 2010: 21-2; Econ Pöyry, 2009: 6, 57; Ozinsky, 2010: 8).