{"id":33295,"date":"2023-03-17T02:19:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-17T02:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=33295"},"modified":"2023-03-18T02:24:16","modified_gmt":"2023-03-18T02:24:16","slug":"whats-the-carbon-footprint-of-march-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/whats-the-carbon-footprint-of-march-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s the carbon footprint of March\u00a0Madness?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brian P. McCullough<\/a>, Texas A&M University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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CC BY-ND<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

March Madness means 68 teams vying to become champion, Cinderella runs for a few underdogs and big business for the NCAA, which earns 85% of its annual operating budget<\/a> during the men\u2019s basketball tournament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But all of that comes at a tremendous cost: An estimated 463 million pounds (210 million kilograms) of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are released into the atmosphere during the three-week event<\/a>. That\u2019s similar to all the emissions of a large university \u2013 such as 2019 champion University of Virginia<\/a> \u2013 for an entire year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These greenhouse gas emissions<\/a> warm the planet, contributing to heat waves, sea level rise and extreme weather. Carbon dioxide equivalent<\/a> is a way of measuring the impact of several different greenhouse gases at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crunching carbon for large-scale event<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A colleague, Alex Cooper<\/a>, and I came up with this figure based on data for the 2019 NCAA Tournament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Past research on the carbon footprint of sporting events has primarily focused on one-city events, such as the Football Association Challenge Cup in the U.K.<\/a> and centralized events like the Olympics<\/a>. Little prior research has sought to determine the environmental impact of a large-scale sporting event like the NCAA\u2019s men\u2019s basketball tournament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, when sports organizers do calculate and report emissions for their events, they typically only report what happens at their facility<\/a> during the event. They don\u2019t consider the environmental impact, for example, of travel to and from the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, we wanted to know, what\u2019s the carbon tally for a huge and popular event<\/a> like March Madness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For our peer-reviewed study<\/a>, which was published in October 2021 in the Journal of Cleaner Production, we aimed to estimate the carbon emissions for all the activities that go into running a massive basketball tournament that takes place in multiple cities across the country in a short span of time. While our estimates are based on 2019, we believe that tournament-generated emissions are comparable to other years, including 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We looked beyond facilities to consider team and fan flight and automobile travel, facility operations, food consumption, waste generation and lodging for everyone based on each team\u2019s progression through the 2019 tournament. We used attendance estimates to determine the impact of hotel stays<\/a>, fan and team air<\/a> and automobile<\/a> travel, waste generation<\/a>, food consumption<\/a> and sport facility operations<\/a> to form our carbon emission model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on our model, we found that this resulted in 463 million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions. That\u2019s about 1,100 pounds (499 kilograms) for every player, coach and fan who attends. That amount is the same as driving over 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) in a typical sedan<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest source of emissions by far was, as you might expect, fan and team travel, which accounted for about 79.95% of the total. The next-largest was hotel stays at 6.83%, followed by food at 6.37%, stadium operations at 5.9% and general waste at 0.95%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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