The NHL (National Hockey League) founded in 1917, making it over 100 years old, is well and truly keeping up with the times. When every organisation of all types and sizes needs to be working to understand and mitigate their climate impact, the NHL is leading the way on sustainability.
What Makes Ice Hockey A Climate Impactful Sport?
The NHL is a huge organisation with 32 member clubs and 670 million fans. Anything this big is likely to have a rather hefty carbon footprint. But that’s not even considering the huge impact of the energy needed to power their stadiums, which vice president of Sustainable Infrastructure and Growth Initiatives at the NHL, Omar Mitchell compares to “a giant refrigerator”. He says, “we use a lot of energy — not to mention the lights we use to illuminate the ice’s surface.”
Unlike many businesses, the NHL relies on particular environmental conditions for its survival. Mitchell points out, “When we think about things that we need for the continuation of hockey, we need things like natural ice, cold weather, and fresh water,”… “We also need vibrant and healthy communities where we can play our sport.” All these things are threatened by the climate crisis, which gives the NHL all the more reason to act with urgency.
How Will The NHL Go Green?
The NHL’s Green Program, launched in 2010, instils sustainable practice across the organisation from an executive to club level. Its first sustainability report was conducted in 2014 and involved a carbon inventory. This inventory allowed the NHL to get to grips with where and how their carbon emissions were produced. When a company calculates their scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions they can locate and measure their impact, in order to develop a plan to reduce it. Carbon calculation is the first step of a businesses’ sustainability journey but unfortunately isn’t as popular as it could be.
Mitchell says…
“It was a documentation of all the scope one, scope two, and limited-scope three greenhouse gas emissions associated with our game and with everything around hosting these events throughout the calendar year”
The NHL ’s Digital Decarbonisation
Upon the release of their second report in 2018 they began to look to technology for optimised methods of data collection and processing. They worked with SAP on a new digital platform called NHL Venue Metrics that gathers data from clubs across the league. Analysis using this platform allows the NHL to interpret their data. The platform is also designed to help venues and operators decide on decarbonising investments and upgrades.
The initial 2014 report found that 70% of the leagues carbon emissions were generated by the energy consumption of their venues. With the help of NHL Venue Metrics it’s thought this percentage could be hugely reduced. Mitchell explains…
“We needed an innovative platform that could help us streamline that data collection, make it easier for all stakeholders to be able to input that data, and to visualize and process it — so that there are meaningful insights that our Clubs and venue partners could act on.”
Summary
All businesses should be releasing transparent and digitally optimised sustainability reports that clearly outline that scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. With the climate crisis ramping us as it is, we don’t have time to wait. The NHL has a huge challenge on its hands to decarbonise such an enormous, carbon intensive organisation. Hopefully, tools like NHL Venue Metrics will make it a more manageable task. Do you think sport can go green?
Source: The NHL Used Technology to Pave the Way for Green Sports
