Green Goal: The Evidence in Favour

For FIFA, the family of football in Germany, and the German Organizing Committee, the 2006 FIFA World Cup was a complete success. The initiators of Green Goal, the first environment initiative at a FIFA World Cup, are celebrating too after the Ecological Institute presented a positive evaluation of the program's success in achieving its ambitious targets.

A proportion of the successes attributable to Green Goal will never be widely appreciated. Measures to minimize water and energy consumption at stadiums will have passed unnoticed by the three million or so match-goers. Water-free urinals, washbasin flow limiters and low-energy lighting played a more or less unseen part in conserving resources.

Measures relating to transport and waste were much more immediately visible. Returnable drinks containers and restrictions on promotional material prevented tons of waste at the stadiums. The fans' preferred mode of transport has especially pleased the Ecological Institute and the Organizing Committee, after some 70% of match-goers elected to leave the car at home and travel to and from the stadiums using public transport, coaches or bicycles.

However, these are just preliminary conclusions. The Ecological Institute is to produce a Legacy Report, precisely analyzing and documenting which Green Goal targets were hit, and which were not. Experts will spend the next few weeks collecting data, including refuse volumes in and around the stadiums, traffic flow reports and the twelve stadiums' energy and water consumption figures. The data will be compared like-for-like to projections of the situation if there had been no environment initiative in operation. The report will also assess the climate protection projects in India and South Africa, intended to neutralize the 100,000 incremental tons of carbon dioxide generated by the tournament.

The final report will be presented to an international conference in late November, where one of the agenda items for experts from around the world will be the implications for Green Goal at future tournaments and similar mass events.

Source: Green Goal website (no longer functioning)

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