Best Foot Forward

Take transport emissions: despite their caveat that the figures should be taken with a 'pinch of salt', it's easy to see a hole in the calculations as big as the Premier League wage bill (£1.3billion/year). The article reckons international spectator travel is c. 33% of emissions - equal to that of competitor travel. This doesn't pass a sense check. To explain here is a quick Fermi estimate:

There are expected to be c. 500, 000 spectators, with 150,000 from Africa. So lets say 400,000 international travellers.  A back of an envelope estimate of players & staff is as follows: 32 teams x 23 per squad. Lets double for support staff. Heck, let's quintuple it ... That makes 3,500 players & staff. So, the question is: how does the international transport emissions of 3,500 people equate to 400,000 spectators (as their pie chart suggests)? We know emissions per passenger km are higher for 1st class air travel ... but this wouldn't make up the difference! A private jet for each player perhaps?

One potential answer is that the analyst has not allocated 100% of those spectator travel emissions to the World Cup event (spectators will be travelling for other reasons too - a nice safari perhaps). This argument is less strong for 'destination events' such as a World Cup or Olympic Games as they would be considered the primary motivation for travel.

Interestingly, a guest on Radio 4's Today Programme this morning predicted a limited increase in total visitors to South Africa this year, hundreds of thousands below expectations. If this is the case then transport emissions will not have increased much against an average year. Whether this is because of the economic downturn or non-football fans shunning the country is unclear. It it was the latter then there is a strong argument for including only the increase in transport emissions above a baseline scenario.

As you can see there are many competing approaches to take in environmental accounting, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

We're not trying to be pedants and really welcome the advent of more numbers in discussions about sustainability. However, in order to retain the value of environmental accounting, all practitioners need to make sure the numbers stack up - or at least explain their assumptions.