Climate change is a growing problem taking face on all parts of the globe. While we are spewing greenhouse gases into are world, our environment is getting hotter and hotter, greatly affecting our ecosystem. While it doesn’t seem like much, things like football travel make an immense impact on our society. UEFA, Europeans soccer’s governing body, announced that the championship will not be held in one country, it will be held all across Europe. On one level this leads to disadvantages for teams that won’t play games in their home country, and on a higher level UEFA is asking these teams to travel a lot at a time when Europe is trying to cut down on their emissions.
An organization said, “If action is not taken to significantly reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of climate change will continue to put future generations at risk.” This was heard all around Europe and organization was forced to offset each of the 405,000 tons of carbon that Euro 2020 will cause to be released. To accomplish this, Aleksander Ceferin, UEFA’s president, promised to plant 60,000 trees all across the continent as an apology to the atmosphere.
This problem also leads to a question that many will not want to have to deal with. With the ongoing emergency of climate change, are we able to support the large amount of carbon being released to help teams and fans travel all over the world? As the problem becomes more extreme and carbon emissions fail to decrease it’s unlikely. In a study at the University of Manchester, scientists estimated that the nominees for the Ballon D’Or alone released 500 tons of carbon into the atmosphere. To put this into perspective, Hueng-Min Son, a professional football player, could have charged 6 million smartphones with this amount of carbon. That’s a lot of carbon to have to support.
While UEFA is taking steps in the right direction, we will need to make more changes down the road, whether it is minimizing travel during major tournaments or finding other ways to counteract the carbon being expended into the atmosphere.