air conditioning, dismantling, recycling… How Qatar is trying to green its stadiums

A France in a turtleneck, even in a down jacket and mittens, will watch the Blues play. While Europeans have been summoned for several months to drastically reduce their energy consumption, the Football World Cup, which opens on November 20 in Qatar, will broadcast to millions of enthusiasts dazzling images of energy abundance in setback.

Moved to winter to escape the extreme temperatures of this wealthy Middle Eastern emirate, the competition will take place in eight stadiums, seven of which have been built specifically to host the global event. As much “jewels of the desert” – this is also the nickname of one of them – firmly embedded in the story of a World Cup “sustainable” and “carbon neutral”, told by the organizers, Fifa and the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee. Jewels of technology assimilated by environmental associations to greenwashing.

“How can air-conditioned stadiums be sustainable?” Here is the rhetorical question posed on the official World Cup website. The organizers’ response can be found in an educational document devoted to the exemplary nature of their stadiums* (in PDF) : state-of-the-art technology, stadiums with retractable roofs in the event of extreme temperatures, air circulation within the structures, insulating materials, “bubbles” freshness under each seat… To justify this excess, Qatar and Fifa summon both engineering and architecture. They do so with these new stadiums a strong argument “sustainable”. Even air-conditioned they use “40% less energy than international standards”, brag the organizers.

Cooling buildings through air conditioners and other fans accounts for 20% of electricity consumption in buildings* worldwide. In Qatar, lowering the temperature inside accounts for 60 to 70% of the country’s total electricity consumption, noted in 2021 the Qatari newspaper The Peninsula*.

In this country which draws its electricity from its abundant natural gas resources, a fossil fuel, minimizing greenhouse gas emissions requires the promotion of a photovoltaic field, built especially to supply these arenas. “A solar power plant has just opened in the west of the country, but it must be understood that it is very far from being enough to supply the stadiums”warns Raphaël Le Magoariec, cresearcher in geopolitics, specialist in the societies of the Arabian Peninsula and in sport, co-author of The Qatar Empire: the new masters of the game? (ed. Robert Laffont).

Qatar “use sport to to gain power and influence on the international scene. He aims for the holy grail of sport. And this is played out in the European summer period, at a time when the conditions [météorologiques] are horrible”, explains the researcher. Especially since, “in the Gulf countries, air conditioning is not a dirty word. It is part of the way of life.”

The deployment of revolutionary air conditioning systems has therefore acted as a strong argument to give credibility to Doha’s candidacy with Fifa. As early as 2011, however, architects admitted that their innovative air conditioning prototype was “too expensive and obviously too polluting if deployed on a large scale”. In 2014, the World Cup was therefore finally moved not in space, but in the calendar: in winter, when the mercury fluctuates between 20 and 25 degrees in Qatar. This decision can reduce the carbon footprint of the World Cup, if the air conditioning is not on during the tournament. But not that of the buildings, designed to be used throughout the year.

Whatever the organizers say, “no construction of air-conditioned stadiums in the desert can claim to participate in the collective effort to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, asserts Guillaume Carbou, lecturer in information and communication sciences at the University of Bordeaux and co-author of the book Greenwashing – Manual for cleaning up public debate (ed. Threshold).

Communicating about a “carbon neutral” competition and highlighting the energy performance of the stadiums – even in the aisles of COP26 – comes down to “greening the packaging, when the whole product is a problem”, he summarizes. The product ? The World Cup itself, an event that gigantism makes “incompatible with a sustainable world”, moreover in a country which did not have the necessary equipment to welcome him before undertaking pharaonic works.

In reality, the energy consumption related to the operation of these stadiums represents only a small part of their climate impact. Producing concrete, cement, steel, glass, emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. To name just one, the Lusail stadium, which will host the final, rests on columns weighing more than 6,000 tonnes of steel. Of the “embedded broadcasts” difficult to trace, underlines Gilles Dufrasne, author of a report by the NGO Carbon Market Watch* on the environmental impact of the World Cup. “Emissions related to the construction of stadiums are potentially up to eight times higher than announced by the organizers”, he believes.

The NGO points to a methodological sleight of hand. According to her, the organizers’ hypothesis is that “Since stadiums have a lifespan of 60 years and the World Cup lasts a month, then they are only responsible for one month in 60 years of the total amount of emissions”, explains Gilles Defrasne.

This calculation also implies that the stadiums will be used after the competition as shopping centers and hotels, or made available to local teams. However, in this country of 2.5 million inhabitants, “the reconversion projects are not very detailed and often not very credible”continues the specialist. “Some stadiums will see their capacity drop but will remain enclosures of significant size. One will receive a local team, another the national women’s team…”he lists, cautious about the future ability to fill the stands.

For the organizers, the stadiums, which can accommodate between 20,000 and 80,000 spectators depending on the different configurations, are neither too numerous nor too big. Because they are partly recycled and recyclable, insists the communication of the event. The excess seats are therefore promised a new life.

Showcase of this effort, the Stade 974 is removable and made from containers. Prior to its construction, “70,000 tonnes of cement and steel have been crushed, sorted and stored for reuse on site. And the containers are made from recycled materials”, lists in a video* the “sustainability” manager of the Qatar 2022 supreme committee, Talar Sahsuvaroglu. “The steel structure in which the containers are inserted was also made from local steel. Most of them contain recycled elements”, she brags.

And downstream? the Stadium 974 is the first completely removable stadium, intended to offer other under-equipped countries the opportunity to host prestigious competitions. “On paper, it’s an interesting idea that takes into account the emissions caused by rebuilding new stadiums every four years. But transporting it to the end of the world would also be very CO2 emitting”, notes Gilles Dufrasne. Emissions related to the work of the various reconversions of post-World Cup stadiums are, in any case, absent from the virtuous assessments presented by the organizers.

Finally, to establish the ecological credibility of these enclosures, the organization puts forward a series of “rewards”. Three stadiums, for example, have received certification “5 stars” issued by the Global Sustainability Assessment System (GSAS), the certification body of the Gulf Organization for Research and Development (Gord), validated by FIFA. As a general rule, resorting to this type of certification “testifies to the respect of a certain number of environmental commitments and are, in this respect also, a powerful communication tool, deciphers Michael Neaves, of the NGO Ecos. Organizations that design [les critères d’évaluation] can choose to emphasize certain aspects (recycling, water management, carbon footprint) and to minimize others.

The Gord being an organization dependent on the Qatari State, itself the organizer of the event, “in this specific case, he made sure to obtain a high level certification which here probably omits to take into account the emissions linked to the materials, thus minimizing the main environmental impacts of this type of construction”, analyzes Michael Neaves. Raphaël Le Magoariec goes further: “You have to be wary of everything related to stadiums in Qatar, including these certifications. The state is behind the construction of the stadiums, it wants to legitimize the use of the technology it has deployed there and cannot be transparent about the real impacts on the environment”. By adopting environmental ambitions“Qatar seeks to seduce, summarizes the researcher. Fifa is greening its rhetoric but is struggling to question this growth-oriented model.

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