Can South Africa's World Cup Possibly Be Green?

From China's Summer Olympics to Denmark's December climate talks, large global gatherings often struggle under the weight of their environmental footprint, despite their best efforts to paint themselves green.

This June, the world's largest sporting event -- the World Cup in South Africa -- is the worst offender of them all, according to a report commissioned by the host country. Of any major event aspiring to be "climate neutral," its carbon footprint will be the largest: about equal to entire year's output of more than 300,000 South African citizens, my calculations tell me.

Even excluding air travel emissions, which are about two-thirds of the total, the event's footprint will be some eight-times higher than the Germany World Cup back in 2006.

The folks at the Center for American Progress note several reasons for the increase. As a still-developing and particularly large country, there are few public transportation options, such as rail lines that travel between and within the 9 cities that will host matches.  Also, coal happens to fuels the majority of the country's energy consumption.

All of this begs the question: How in the world will these games be carbon neutral? The answer, the only real option, is for organizers to buy their way out with carbon offsets and to plant trees, hundreds of thousands of them, of course. But these plans have apparently been poorly organized and murky at the outset, according to CNN. And building a new stadium in Durban may have been unnecessary in the first place.

Carbon offsets themselves are tricky business. The World Bank enraged environmentalists when it recently approved $3.75 billion loan for a new South African coal plant. Now, as ClimateWire reports, the power developer is rubbing salt in the wound with plans to seek carbon credits to improve the plant's efficiency. If approved, these are the kinds of credits that the game's offset buyers could purchase.

South Africa feels all of this criticism is unfair. "Although, there is always room for improvement and learning from past mistakes... For the department and South Africa, this is yet another milestone along the country's sustainable development growth path," a South African official told CNN.

Massive events like the World Cup do indeed attract foreign and domestic investment in clean and modern infrastructure, such as a recent $1 million from the U.N. And host cities have been forced to implement some public transport systems that will hopefully leave a lasting legacy. We saw those same arguments during China's Olympics stint, and already Indonesia is bidding to host the “Green World Cup 2022."

I'd love to hear readers thoughts on this. Is the World Cup helping South Africa grow in a sustainable way, or it a waste of their resources and a carbon party to boot?

Photo credit: Flickr user shanediaz120