Over a million trees? What it would take to offset Tartan Army’s world cup travel |
This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.
We all know that the FIFA men's World Cup isn’t good for the planet and there has been plenty to suggest this tournament looks set to be one of the worst. But exactly how bad? How many millions of tonnes of emissions, and how many trees, for instance, would it take to suck them back up again?
As a newly-published paper - Football and the Climate, delivered by the University of Manchester, Loughborough University and the University of Bristol - notes, this World Cup could be “the most polluting ever because of the vast distances that a greater number of teams and their fans will travel... the main sponsor, Aramco, being the biggest polluter in the world.”
The report mentions that the direct carbon footprint of football is “to a significant extent, driven by fans travelling to stadiums”.
I'm reminded of a scene in Twenty Twenty Six, a BBC spoof mockumentary that follows the ‘Oversight’ team of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Staff are discussing offsetting the tournament’s travel impact through planting trees, when one says: “So we’re predicting about five million people are going to show up? Let’s say each person that shows up ends up travelling 10,000 miles. Which is probably going to be a conservative estimate, right? So that’s 10,000 times five million people … that’s 55 billion trees.”
It's a wildly comic exaggeration, though as with all massive numbers, it's often difficult to know that unless you dig into the figures.
Is 55 billion trees a ridiculous amount? Clue: the number of trees generally planted per year is just over 1.8 billion trees globally.
So, how far from 55 billion trees would an off-setting of the whole of........