Since Qatar won the bid for FIFA World Cup 2022 it has used its financial and natural resources to work for ‘carbon-neutral’ World Cup with a ‘sustainable legacy’. It aims to use the WC as a catalyst for positive change in the country and inspire the world. However, along the way Qatar has faced international criticism due to the enormous amount of money being dedicated to constructions and the appalling conditions the migrant WC workforce has been subjected to. Many critics have declared that Fifa WC 2022, a ‘World Cup of Shame’. In this blog post, I will explore to what extent Qatar has been successful in working towards its promised sustainable legacy.
In the recent awakening of its environmental consciousness, Qatar has begun to emphasize the need of sustainable development, which can be seen in its preparations for the WC as well as its Qatar National Vision 2030. This emphasis on sustainable development reflects Qatar’s acknowledgement of its current environmental and economic issues and its efforts to provide resource and economic security to the coming generations. Hence, sustainable development in its core entails a sense of intergenerational equity and justice. The Sustainable Strategy Report put forth by the Supreme Committee of Delivery and Legacy (SC) declares, “sustainability has been at the heart of the FIFA World Cup 2022™ from the start, with planning and delivery premised on the idea that generations to come should find our shared planet a greener, more equitable place, free from discrimination…”. This statement communicates the rhetoric of intergenerational justice that Qatar aims to achieve through including sustainability in the WC preparations. However, the interaction of intergenerational justice and a sports Mega-event like WC seems unusual and uncommon. How does Qatar aim to achieve intergenerational justice by hosting an (questanably sustainable) event of tremendous scale and impact? I argue that Qatar’s focus on creating a sustainable legacy for its future generations through a ‘green’ WC and the ways through which it is trying to achieve this green WC demonstrate a limited aspect of the principle of environmental justice.
The concept of environmental justice has been greatly critiqued in the field of environmental humanities. It refers to the just distribution of resources for all people regardless of their socio-economic status and is extended to future generations as well. To comprehend this term better, let us look at what environmental injustice is. Urban eco-researchers, Helga Leitner, Emma Colven and Eric Sheppard (2017) in their case study on the effect of hydroelectric engineering projects to counter flooding in Jakarta, quote the scholarship on environmental injustice as “the uneven socio-spatial distribution of environmental hazards” and “disproportionate environmental and health impacts of air toxins, pesticides, landfills, resource scarcity on communities of color and/or lower income neighbourhoods” (p.200). Hence, working for environmental justice means working not just to ensure equal distribution of resources for all people (from current and future generations) regardless of color, socio-economic status but also to ensure their equal protection from environmental dangers. In the case of Qatar, the struggle for working for environmental justice results from resource scarcity that Qatar currently faces both in its limited natural resources of water and agriculture land as well as depleting fossil fuel reserves. Another significant voice, in the field of EH, Hessie (2008) in one of the chapters of her book ‘Sense of Place, Sense of Planet’, discusses her analyses of two competing environmental rhetorics- place and global interconnectedness. To reach her argument about rhetoric of place, she extensively discusses the literature of environmental justice ecocriticism. She (2008) writes that environmental justice activists draw attention to the fact that “not only the privileges of encounters with nature as well as the risks associated with some branches of agribusiness and industry are unevenly distributed but that this uneven distribution has in some instances helped to perpetuate environmentally unsound practices whose consequences have often not been suffered or even noticed by the middle class” (p. 31). Hessie (2008) agrees with this and declares the activities as being ‘quite right’. Hence, this again stresses that the people most in danger of suffering due to unequal distribution of resources and environmental risks, are the poor people of low socio-economic status.
At this point, you may be wondering how the above discussion of environmental justice connects to Qatar’s promise of sustainable legacy and intergenerational justice through the WC. I mentioned above that Qatar’s efforts of a sustainable WC demonstrate a limited aspect of environmental justice. Qatar is developing strategies to work for sustainable tournaments through designing stadiums that use 40% less water and energy by using innovative and efficient technologies of cooling, insulation and lighting. Such strategies that are implemented to decrease the pressure on Qatar’s natural resources during the WC reflect that Qatar is trying to ensure that a mega-event like the WC does not exhaust Qatar’s resources, significantly degrading the environment for the future generations, leading to unequal resource distribution. However, I argue that Qatar is not extending this environmental justice to everyone as the migrant workforce have clearly been excluded from this justice. Since the beginning of construction for the WC ten years ago, the migrant workers of Qatar have faced immense hardships like very low pays, congested living conditions, extremely long working hours in the scorching heat. According to the Guardian, 1300 Nepali workers have died from heatstroke in the last eight years and statistics show that if no change occurs, by 2022, more than 4000 migrants workers will have died to the inhumane conditions they are facing. The leader of Norwegian trade comments that if we are to hold a minute of silence for each estimated death of WC worker that will have occurred by 2022, the first 44 matches of the WC will be silent!
The scholarship on environmental injustice highlights that people more at risk of environmental risks and the struggles of unequal resource distribution are those of low socio-economic status, which is exactly what is happening in Qatar. The poor migrant workers face deadly high temperatures while working on implementation of sustainability strategies that were designed to benefit the current people of Qatar as well as future generations. Why does Qatar not extend environmental justice to the workforce that is responsible for the majority of the progress Qatar has achieved on its preparations of the WC? Why does Qatar practice this limited form of environmental justice, where it only works to ensure ecological security for its own citizens while leaving the migrant workers completely out of the environmental justice equation? It is important to note that Fifa as well as SC have issued multiple statements recognizing the problems faced by the workers and have made promises to make efforts for improving their conditions, the most significant being the promise of abolishing the Khalafa system; however, no major improvement has occurred in the past ten years. For this reason many critics have accused Qatar of ‘failing their workers’ and even raised petitions to transfer WC to another host country.
Qatar’s efforts to leave a sustainable legacy through the WC and the complication it faces with its labor sector, forces us to question the usefulness of the rhetoric of environmental justice. Hessie (2008) argues that both the initial concept of sustainable development as well as its revisions which include a notion of environmental justice in them “have not to date generated the kind of powerful images” that were believed could be achieved by this term when it was coined (p. 27). Hessie’s comment makes us further lose our faith in the power of sustainable development and what it can achieve through intergenerational environmental justice. This discussion of Qatar’s promise of sustainable legacy through Fifa World Cup 2022 and exclusion of migrant workers from the environmental justice rhetoric raises many questions: Can Qatar achieve intergenerational equity for its citizens while excluding the migrant workers? Can environmental justice be achieved just by manipulating resource scarcity or does it require a change in social policies too for the people most vulnerable to environmental injustice to be included in it? Will a post-World Cup Qatar have the sustainable legacy it is so desperately seeking to achieve?
Resources:
Heise, U. K. (2008). From the blue planet to google earth-environmentalism, ecocriticism, and the imagination of the global. Sense of place and sense of planet: The environmental imagination of the global, 17-67.
Leitner, H., Colven, E., & Sheppard, E. (2017). Ecological security for whom? The politics of flood alleviation and urban environmental justice in Jakarta, Indonesia. In The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities (pp. 210-221). Routledge.
