Via The Japan Times, a look at how Japan’s top soccer league is striving to become a climate leader:

The average J. League fan never leaves the house on game day without their uniform, a scarf-shaped towel and perhaps a flag.

But check the bags of some supporters these days and you might find them bringing reusable tumblers, obsolete electronic devices for recycling or even bottles of used cooking oil to the stadium — all in the name of reducing waste and protecting the environment.

It’s a sign of changing attitudes among fans, clubs and the league itself as Japanese soccer — and the sports world as a whole — grapples with the wide-ranging impacts of climate change on operations and their own role in global warming.

As the league has grown from 10 to 60 clubs since its inaugural 1993 season, its quest to bring healthier and more active lifestyles to the Japanese public has expanded to ensuring that they have a place to safely participate in sports, with a greater focus on environmental issues such as reducing waste and shrinking the J. League’s carbon footprint.

Kashima Antlers hosted Japan’s first green energy-powered sporting event in December 2006 at the team’s stadium in Ibaraki Prefecture at a time when clubs were attempting a number of initiatives, from encouraging the use of public transit on match days to offering discounts on beer to fans who brought reusable cups.

The league’s focus on shakai renkei (social cooperation) projects — which it dubs “sharen” — in line with U.N. Sustainable Development Goals led to the 2020 establishment of the Sharen Awards, which recognize the most innovative, progressive and media-friendly projects of the year.

In January, the league tapped social business consultant Takayuki Tsujii, a former president of outdoor apparel-maker Patagonia’s Japanese branch, to lead its new sustainability division, which was formed by the merger of internal groups focusing on climate action and SDG activities.

“Clubs can only truly flourish if they’re in an energetic and healthy community,” Tsujii says. “And that’s why there’s been such a strong emphasis on sharen projects.”

Recipients of Sharen Awards vary greatly in scale and scope, from Vissel Kobe providing its Noevir Stadium as a mass COVID-19 vaccination site to Cerezo Osaka offering reading materials and backpack safety covers to local schoolchildren.

In recent years, climate and environment-related projects have grown in number — from 133 in 2016 to 873 in 2022 — with many clubs embarking on recycling-related initiatives and other ways to reduce both waste and carbon emissions.

The presence of clubs in 41 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, from Okinawa to Hokkaido, has led to a diverse range of approaches to fighting climate change.

Grassroots efforts

FC Osaka, which this year became the J. League’s 60th club upon joining the third-division J3, has been particularly ambitious in its carbon-neutral policies, signing onto the Science Based Targets Initiative in August 2022.

Outside the club’s Hanazono Rugby Stadium on June 4, fans were able to trade in containers of used cooking oil for free game tickets. FC Osaka developed the program with club sponsor Ueda Yushi, which recycles the oil to make soap products, in order to reduce the environmental burden created by cooking oil that’s thrown away improperly.

“As a soccer club, it’s important to connect to a lot of people, and that’s something special to us,” Seita Kotani, FC Osaka’s head of sales, told The Japan Times before the team’s home game against AC Nagano Parceiro. “In creating these opportunities, we can involve everyone, and that’s how sports can become central to society.”

At a nearby tent organized by the Higashiosaka Municipal Government, attendees lined up to receive a free evaluation of their home’s energy consumption habits along with recommendations on resources and methods to further reduce their carbon footprint.

Yasuo Michihata, head of Higashiosaka’s environmental planning division, was pleased at the turnout more than an hour ahead of the 1 p.m. kickoff, saying the group was on pace to more than double its average of 30 to 40 consultations before a soccer or rugby game at Hanazono.

“We want more people to think about the environment,” Michihata says. “If we go to environmental events, we get people who are already aware of environmental issues, but going to sporting events helps get the attention of people who might not have considered this sort of thing.”

Though FC Osaka’s average attendance is only around 2,500 per game — less than a 10th of Hanazono’s 30,000-seat capacity — Kotani is optimistic that the club’s environmental efforts will grow along with its fan base.

“The most important thing we can do is make the expected things commonplace,” Kotani says. “In Europe there’s an advanced understanding of environmental issues, but Japan hasn’t reached that point, so the club is creating these efforts to raise awareness.

“Ideally we want people to come to the stadium and watch us play. You can watch it on TV, but as much as possible we want people to gather here, and in order to do that we have to tackle the climate problem.”

Typhoons, heavy rain and heat
Although the J. League is making significant progress toward a climate-conscious future, it still has to face an unpredictable present.

In announcing the establishment of a Climate Action Partner sponsorship category on May 15, the league wrote that “The impact of increasingly severe natural disasters in Japan is remarkable, and in order to continue to make it possible to play soccer the J. League must earnestly work toward finding solutions to climate change.”

Severe weather such as typhoons, flooding and snowstorms forced the cancellation of 58 games between 2018 and 2022 — a 314% increase over the 14 rescheduled between 2013 and 2017 for similar reasons.

Two days before FC Osaka hosted Parceiro, an unusually strong rain front fueled by a tropical storm caused flooding and transit disruptions across Japan’s main island of Honshu — preventing Kawasaki Frontale from traveling west to play Vissel Kobe.

With the number of J. League games in a season rising from 180 in 1993 to 1,148 this year, extreme regional weather events can wreak havoc on schedules, forcing more teams to play on short rest and increasing the potential for injuries. Clubs’ bottom lines are affected as well, with games moved from weekends to weeknights drawing fewer fans and generating less revenue.

Yet the nuisance of rain postponements is almost no match for the heat and humidity faced by players during the summer months. Though most J. League games kick off at 7 p.m. between June and September in order to avoid playing in the hottest part of the day, that’s not always feasible for lower-division clubs with insufficient stadium lighting.

The potential to reduce players’ exposure to summer heat is one factor driving discussions over whether to shift the J. League calendar to a fall-spring schedule, which would move the league’s offseason from between December and January to between June and July.

Such a change may only offer temporary relief, however: According to the Environment Ministry, peak annual temperatures — occurring in August — across all of Japan’s main four islands could exceed 40 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 in a high-emissions scenario.

“If society doesn’t … treat this seriously, then in 50 years, in the near future, it will become harder for (the J. League) to operate (over) the whole year, because of the climate,” Tsujii says.

Soccer is hardly alone in struggling to adjust its schedule against a hotter planet. Earlier this month, smoke from massive wildfires in eastern Canada drifted to the east coast of the United States, forcing several professional sports leagues including Major League Baseball to postpone games due to extremely poor air quality — which global soccer players’ union FIFPro says can leave players “particularly at risk.”

“As well as protecting players from the impact of climate change in their professional lives, football also has a social responsibility to acknowledge and reduce its carbon footprint,” the organization writes on its website. “The football industry needs to proactively address climate risks and implement responsible and sound practices across all operations.”

Some leagues are beginning to pay attention. Since 2019, nonprofit organization Sport Positive has tracked efforts by clubs in the English Premier League and other top European domestic competitions to combat climate change, noting in its 2022 edition that “more and more clubs are recruiting Sustainability Managers to lead their work, are making external commitments, being transparent about their impact and are investing in reducing their own impact on the environment.”

But the industry still often struggles with the question of how to hold clubs and organizations accountable to their commitments. A Swiss advertising regulator found earlier this month that FIFA had made false and misleading statements regarding the carbon neutrality of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, saying that soccer’s global governing body “was not able to provide proof that (its) claims were accurate.”

Madeleine Orr, a researcher and educator who focuses on the relationship between climate change and sports, notes that the sports world has a big opportunity to spread awareness, but there’s a lingering reluctance for many to fully dive in.

While “few other entities enjoy the same level of visibility and engagement from the public,” she says, “some sports organizations are hesitant to engage the advocacy side before they ‘get their house in order.’

“This includes finding ways to reduce travel, craft smarter — more localized or regionalized — schedules for intercity and international sports, adopting energy-efficient and water-efficient solutions in all sport facilities, and encouraging fans to follow suit.”

Travel is often the biggest target for clubs looking to go greener. According to Kotani, a 2022 audit found that FC Osaka’s biggest carbon emissions occur when traveling to away games, and a long-term goal of the club’s collaboration with sponsor Ueda Yushi is to fuel the team bus using recycled oil.

Although its travel schedule may pale in comparison to jet-setting European clubs, many of the team’s J3 opponents are located in regions that require travel by bus or plane. But by the time FC Osaka is in a position to potentially climb to the upper echelons of the pyramid and qualify for continental competitions such as the Asian Champions League, solutions for carbon-neutral team operations may be within sight, Orr believes.

“Carbon neutrality is probably out of reach for most sport organizations right now, but with the right set of decisions and actions by upper management at sports leagues, we could see that become a realistic target within the next 10 years (for a 2040 or 2050 end date).”

A matter of sustainability
As the J. League fights to combat climate change, it’s also working on deepening club-hometown relationships with a long-term goal of developing and boosting local economies — a pair of efforts that are deeply intertwined.

Key to the success of both are sustainability projects that will not only reduce the league’s carbon footprint but keep money flowing within communities — such as a community-owned solar power generator outside Shimizu S-Pulse’s IAI Stadium Nihondaira.

“If you purchase this electricity from a corporation, all the money will go out of your town…. But if you build this kind of facility in your own region, and if you buy that electricity, then the owner will get the money, which means the money will remain in that region,” Tsujii says.

“In many cases, projects related to sustainability tend to be looked at in a cost-centered way, (because the assumption is that) you have to spend more money on sustainability, and it’s not sustainable as a business. But if you can just circulate that business and activate the local economy, that will come back to you at the end of the day.”

Though the road ahead is long, Tsujii sees shifting attitudes that show an increase in environmental consciousness. The league has received several expressions of interest for Climate Action Partner sponsorships, which will contribute toward its target of purchasing carbon offsets for the entirety of the 2023 season.

Meanwhile, another Sharen Award recipient — a collaboration between Mito Hollyhock and a 10-year-old student to offer plant-based protein burgers made with local ingredients at the team’s 2022 home finale — shows that younger fans are not only aware of climate issues, but increasingly driven to face the problem head-on.

“NHK Mito covered that project very positively, and it offered a lot of hints going forward,” Tsujii recalled. “It’s not about giving people obligations or telling them to do certain things. They showed not only that you can work together in a fun way to develop new ideas, but also the significance of being able to change society.”