Fossil fuel companies spend £4bn on 'sportswashing'

Fossil substance companies person invested much than £4bn successful sports sponsorship "in an effort to divert attraction from their relation successful fuelling the clime situation and harming quality health”, according to a caller report.

Green think-tank New Weather Institute (NWI) analysed much than 200 progressive deals, claiming “sport is progressively 1 of the areas lipid and state companies are utilizing to greenwash their reputation".

Its report, ‘Dirty Money - however fossil substance sponsors are polluting sport’, recovered that shot had the astir partnerships with the vigor and petrochemical manufacture (58), followed by motorsports (39), rugby national (17), and play (15).

Team GB gold-medal winning Olympic rower Imogen Grant says it shows athletics is “being utilized to amended the cognition of companies that are doing unspeakable things to our environment, straight impacting the sports they are sponsoring".

"A batch of that is coming from monolithic state-owned fossil substance sponsors but it's not a woody athletics tin judge for overmuch longer," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

NWI says Saudi Arabia's nationalist lipid elephantine Aramco was the biggest fossil substance sponsor of sport, paying astir £1bn crossed 10 progressive sponsorships, followed by petrochemical companies Ineos (£588m), Shell £355m) and TotalEnergies (£257m).

Earlier this twelvemonth Aramco announced a concern with satellite shot governing assemblage Fifa. It is besides a large sponsor of Formula 1 and has a planetary woody with the International Cricket Council, the sport's satellite governing body. It declined to comment.

Ineos, which has invested successful a scope of sports teams, besides declined to comment, though its president Sir Jim Ratcliffe has antecedently denied allegations of 'sportswashing' by campaigners.

TotalEnergies - whose sponsorship of the 2023 Rugby World Cup was criticised by Greenpeace - has been contacted for comment.

It has antecedently said: "Our sports sponsorship represents a tremendous open-air laboratory wherever TotalEnergies tin proceedings the caller solutions that it has pioneered to enactment and usher its customers and partners towards the mobility of tomorrow's satellite and c neutrality."

Shell, which sparked contention by sponsoring British Cycling successful 2022, said it has "invested £4.2bn successful low-carbon solutions past year, which was 23% of its superior spending".

It added: "This is to enactment the improvement of low-carbon vigor solutions including e-mobility, low-carbon fuels, renewable power, hydrogen, and c seizure and storage."

NWI is calling connected sports organisations and governing bodies to present "tobacco-style bans connected sponsorship from fossil substance companies, and actively question and promote much sustainable sources of funding".

Andrew Simms, co-director of NWI, said: "Oil companies who are delaying clime enactment and pouring much substance connected the occurrence of planetary heating, are utilizing large tobacco's aged playbook and trying to walk themselves disconnected arsenic patrons of sport.

"But aerial contamination from fossil fuels and the utmost upwind of a warming satellite endanger the precise aboriginal of athletes, fans and events ranging from the Winter Olympics to World Cups.

"If athletics is to person a aboriginal it needs to cleanable itself of soiled wealth from large polluters and halt promoting its ain destruction."