By Dom Winter, Head of Advocacy at climate action charity for outdoor sports Protect Our Winters UK
The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, called upon “every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising”. Since this intervention in 2024, fossil fuel companies have continued to spend literal billions on sportswashing, while the world is once again plunged into a global energy crisis, driven by war, that will generate ‘super profits’ for these major polluters.
Sponsorship deals and commercial partnerships across sport are used by damaging companies to gain public support (or at least the appearance of it). This, alongside hundreds of millions spent on direct lobbying of Governments, serves to head off policy changes and suppress public backlash which could ultimately impact their bottom line - a strategy known as maintaining ‘social licence’.
Activists have been organising tirelessly to target specific instances of polluting sports sponsorships, from the Wizz Air-sponsored half marathon in Ealing, to Shell’s British Cycling partnership (as well as in the arts of course, for example the Science Museum).
Campaigning against polluting sponsorship can, however, at times feel a bit like whack-a-mole. As soon as we celebrate a win such as South Africa's Comrades Marathon dropping ‘oily’ sponsors, BP sneaks in a sponsorship with Tottenham Hotspur. They did so via a quiet switch from initially announced ‘BP Pulse’ EV-charging division to the full BP brand. As a Spurs fan, the BP logo kicking around is more embarrassing to me than being dead-last in the Premier League table a few weeks back.
The Cool Down - Sport for Climate Action Network’s Fossil Free Declaration provides professional athletes, sports organisations and recreational athletes with a mechanism for committing to avoiding these polluting sponsorship deals in future. Yet this declaration is voluntary.
There are two specific levers that could provide major wins in this fight across numerous sports and, most importantly, sustain them.
First, governments could legislate to ban fossil fuel adverts outright and with immediate effect.
There’s precedent for this, with tobacco, which in 2003 was banned across print, billboards and direct marketing - not just sport. Fossil fuels are now estimated to kill more people each year just from air pollution than tobacco.
Advertising bans and restrictions have been proliferating at a city and local level, with Bristol, Sheffield and Edinburgh introducing policies that cover high-carbon goods and services, such as those peddled by fossil fuel firms. Beyond the UK, cities like Amsterdam, Haarlem, Helsinki and more have all moved to bad fossil fuel advertising.
There’s even a great opportunity to do this in the UK right now, with the Sporting Events Bill has gone through Committee stage, set to report back to the House of Commons. It could ensure any elite sporting event seeking protection under the Act would have to be free of advertising and sponsorship by fossil fuel companies. In fact, amendments to do this were already proposed by Baroness Bennett at the Lords stage, but were not adopted. Would the policymakers really be happy to see sports they support having fossil fuel company logos displayed? Can a ban be brought back now it’s in the Commons? How can we as a movement rally behind this?
Secondly, major funders like Sport England have revamped their funding requirements to require sustainability strategies.
This has, in my opinion, marked a complete step change in how national governing bodies have been getting on top of their operational sustainability. Yet despite my asking them several times, Sport England seems to want to keep it to only operational sustainability and are reluctant to add anything about sponsorship to the actions required. Even something soft - like having to consider sponsors through a lens of sustainability - would be an important indicator of the issue and, at the very least, give pause to sports organisations weighing up who to partner with.
One place it has been great to see progress is the Sport for Climate Action framework from the United Nations. Since a recent framework update, it covers sponsorship much better - as I and others from the Cool Down network had pushed for over the previous years, including during the Technical Consultation phase.
It now recognises that sponsors and partners can “help or hinder an organization’s ability to implement their climate action goals. Signatories to the Framework should make every effort to ensure their sponsors and partners are similarly aligned and then use that connection to pursue common goals of mitigation, adaptation and communication." It also states sport should "avoid promoting messaging that contradicts a climate resilient future".
We hope to see the signatories, including FIFA, British Cycling and many others, taking this on board at the next opportunity - albeit some have made this pretty difficult for themselves by signing eight-year agreements with fossil fuel majors. Likewise, hopefully the United Nations will start to be firmer on (or more open on information regarding) compliance requirements for remaining a signatory.
So, can governments and funders help us red card fossil fuel funding for good?
-
Dom Winter is Head of Advocacy at climate action charity for outdoor sports Protect Our Winters UK - which is a member of Cool Down Network - and he has provided Carbon Literacy training sessions and sustainability strategy input to National Governing Bodies.