The man who devised the whole system, Dr Saud Abdul Ghani, told the BBC that Qatar wants to create a legacy, to serve the country long after the footballers have gone home. He says years of extensive research have gone into what he calls “thermal comfort,” creating an environment that’s pleasant for the maximum number of people. Conversations with athletes and fans at the World Athletics Championships held in Qatar in 2019 helped inform planning that will benefit visitors and players at the World Cup. A player’s perspective The BBC contacted Hajar Saleh, a defender with Qatar’s national women’s football team and a player since she was 11. He knows all about the demands of playing top-level sports in extreme conditions. He says humidity is the biggest challenge. We are used to being hot, but when you combine heat and humidity, things get more difficult Hajar Saleh Hajar had first-hand experience playing in two of the new venues with the new air conditioning systems, the Khalifa and the Educational City stadium. He says it makes a huge difference, especially when playing in June, one of Qatar’s hottest months of the year. Is the system sustainable? Qatar 2022 organizers promise that the power to cool entire stadiums will not lead to additional greenhouse gas emissions because the electricity comes from the new solar power facility. But the goal of ensuring the entire tournament is carbon neutral is a much bolder ambition. The amount of ’embodied’ carbon – these are the emissions produced during the construction of the stadiums – represents 90% of the venues’ total carbon footprint, with an estimated 800,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of driving a passenger car around the world 80,000 times, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions calculator. Looking beyond the stadiums, there is the impact of transportation to the World Cup, including the flights that take fans around the country. FIFA says the compact nature of the tournament, with only short distances between venues, means emissions from travel between sites in Qatar are estimated to be less than a third of those produced at Russia 2018. Qatar’s green pledges are based on using carbon offsets to offset all the CO2 it already emits. So far it is not very clear how they hope to achieve this. FIFA says it is using different technologies to offset World Cup emissions, including energy efficiency, waste management, renewable energy and possibly tree planting. However, the final selection of projects cannot yet be confirmed. Such systems may take decades to become effective at sequestering carbon. A recent BBC investigation showed that some forests planted for compensation exist only on paper. So it will be some time before we can truly judge whether Qatar has actually achieved its green goals, or whether its sustainability claims are too much hot air. The country also continues to fend off criticism of the high human cost among the 30,000 migrant workers who built the stadiums, including large numbers of workers who were killed and seriously injured. There were also allegations of forced labor, grueling working conditions, squalid housing, unpaid wages and confiscated passports. The Qatari government disputes these accounts and insists that since 2017 it has introduced measures to protect migrant workers from working in extreme heat, limit their working hours and improve conditions in labor camps. However, in 2021 alone, 50 workers died and more than 500 others were seriously injured in Qatar among all those involved in World Cup-related projects, according to data compiled by the International Labor Organization. This is another matter off the pitch where the desert kingdom’s record will remain in check.
