By Peter Fabricius
Next year's World Cup will leave a carbon footprint nearly nine times that of Germany in 2006 - and that is before calculating the footprint for international flights to South Africa.
The event will send 896 661 tons of global-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with international travel contributing another 1 856 589 tons.
This is the conclusion of a study commissioned by the Department of Environment and Tourism, conducted by Swedish consultants and the Norwegian embassy, financed by the Norwegian government.
Although the point of the study, completed in February, was to identify what should be done for a carbon-neutral World Cup, sources involved in the project say they are not aware much has been done.
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The study said it would cost between $5.4 million (R40.9m) and $9m for carbon offset projects to counter the effect of the World Cup carbon output.
Certainly President Jacob Zuma did not seem to know whether anything had been done yet. During a press conference with visiting Norwegian King Harald V in Pretoria this week, he thanked the Norwegians for helping South Africa to host a green World Cup.
But when a journalist pressed him for details, Zuma scrum-halfed the question to the king, who frankly admitted he did not know. However, it appears that Norway financed the study and is waiting for a response from South Africa.
"The Fifa 2010 World Cup will have the largest carbon footprint of any major event with a goal to be 'climate neutral'," the study found. It attributes the huge carbon output largely to the size of South Africa compared to Germany and therefore the distances players, officials and fans will have to travel between matches.
South Africa's relatively unsophisticated transport infrastructure is also blamed. The lack of fast trains means most people will fly between cities - notching up large amounts of CO2. And within cities, most people will travel by carbon-heavy car or bus rather than light trains as in Germany.
If international transport is taken into account, the footprint will be 2 753 250 tons.
The study says proposed greening measures "will only affect the smaller components of the carbon footprint" because they deal only with emissions from stadium and precinct energy use and intra-city transport - just 9 percent of the domestic carbon footprint.
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This article was originally published on page 5 of Cape Argus on November 27, 2009
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