World Cup: Brazil champion of digital sustainability

Each web page pollutes, causing CO₂ emissions; to bring attention on the issue of 'digital pollution', KarmaMetrix.com calculated the emissions of CO₂ caused by the websites home pages of the teams qualified for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, simulating the World Cup scoreboard, with the groups and the crossings exactly as they will be in Qatar.

Among the qualified teams, the Brazilian Football federation website is the most sustainable one (55kg of CO₂ per year), followed by Denmark and Germany (111kg of CO₂ per year each) completing the podium with equal merit.
The last place in the digital sustainability ranking is occupied by United States (6,655 kg of CO₂ per year), followed by Canada (4,521 kg of CO₂ per year) and Switzerland (1,323 kg of CO₂ per year).

England, on the other hand, ranks only 23rd, 705kg of CO₂ emitted.

“Football is a global phenomenon. With the digital sustainability soccer world cup, we want to raise awareness about the fact that the web also pollutes and contributes to climate change, that affects every corner of our planet” commented Ale Agostini, founder of Karma Metrix. “These days COP 27 is taking place in Egypt and little is said about the Web, which would be the 4th country in the world in terms of CO₂. Making digital objects more efficient and eco-sustainable means contributing to the fight against climate change. Football and sport can contribute and lead by example.”

Karma metrix measures the environmental impact of a website using an algroithm (patent pending) that takes into consideration multiple 'on-page' elements of the web page that impact on energy efficiency. Each page analysed is compared with a benchmark. Finally, the improvement takes place through the identification of energy efficiency areas at page and site level.

Methodology

The measurement was carried out with the Karmametrix.com tool on the homepages of the federations of the teams that had access to the final phase of the World Cup. The measurement was carried out between 1^st and 4^th November 2022, assuming 120,000 views in a year. Measured emissions may vary over time based on various factors, such as device and browser. For technical reasons related to the sites, it was not possible to carry out the measurement on the sites of the federations of Mexico, Uruguay and South Korea.