Here’s wishing you a very warm welcome to the first of what will become a fortnightly blog documenting our sustainability journey at the Desert Vipers. We hope that by being transparent about our objectives and our progress we can help others in sport who share similar goals, and perhaps inspire those who do not yet have a formal sustainability strategy to start on their own journeys. We believe that together we are stronger, and so we invite scrutiny, are open to ideas, and are ready to fail as long as we are giving this our very best shot. So, for this first edition we will cover some basic background information on who we are and highlight some of our progress to date.

The Desert Vipers are a Dubai-based cricket franchise, playing in the International League T20 - the UAE’s premier cricket tournament that is held each year in January and February. Season One of the ILT20 held last year was a fantastic success, seeing some of the world’s very best players go head-to-head for six newly formed teams. The Desert Vipers fell at the final hurdle, losing to the Gulf Giants in a keenly contested final held at the Dubai International Stadium. We aim to go one better this year, so watch this space!

Ahead of our first season we focussed on assembling a world-class team on and off the pitch, creating a culture and environment for on-field success and building relationships in our new home, the incredible metropolis of Dubai. Ahead of our Season Two, we have had time to consider who we are and what we stand for, working from a clean slate. We have consulted with our ownership and other key stakeholders, and we came to a clear direction of travel very easily.

The world is experiencing a climate emergency and sport as we know it is in peril: extreme weather caused by climate change is resulting in the cancellation of numerous sporting events and dangerous conditions for players. Cricket was named as the most climate-vulnerable pitch sport in the 2017 Game Changer report, as referenced in this excellent piece on the impact of climate change on cricket published by the British Association For Sustainable Sport. We have already seen the impact of this in multiple ways – flooding, drought, bushfires, air quality and extreme heat have already caused disruption to matches and affected players, including in some of our own player’s home nations. As the Desert Vipers want to be the best possible citizens in our adopted home and support its diverse community, we have decided to focus our energy this year on climate change. We believe that putting environmental and social sustainability at the heart of everything that we stand for and everything that we engage in off the cricket pitch is, quite simply, the right thing to do. So how did we get ourselves on the front foot to start to tackle this challenge?

We started by formally writing our “Mission and Values”. Our “Mission” is “to build a team culture that makes us successful on the cricket field and role models off it”. One of our four key values is: “Sustainability - we place sustainability at the core of our operations and aim to be best-in-class amongst global sports teams”. Our “Mission and Values” are important to enable us to communicate both internally and externally and are crucial to inculcating a sustainable approach and mindset in everything that we do. More on that in a future blog.

We believe that sport has a huge opportunity to communicate with and influence fans on important issues. In order to have an authentic voice in doing so we commissioned our agency, Carbon Happy World, to measure our entire carbon footprint from Season One. We then held an event at the Home of Cricket, Lord’s, to announce our findings alongside various other initiatives. The process was fascinating and will form the basis of our reduction strategy, and inform much of the content of this blog. Our Season One carbon footprint was approximately 573 tonnes (and we are still adding elements into the calculation as we get more data). Implementation of our emerging reduction strategy has already started.

Next, we set ourselves formal targets and joined a supportive network by becoming Dubai’s first signatory to the UN Sport For Climate Action Framework. This means that we have committed to reducing our emissions by 50% by 2030 and to achieve Net Zero by 2040.

Today we are pleased to share our 12-month Sustainability Strategy Framework [PDF]. This details some of our plans and describes in headline detail how we will approach sustainability within our organization. Please do give it a read and let us know what you think. Shout out to Ben Hardy-Jones who has recently joined us on placement from our Partner - the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University - for his contribution to this document and again thanks to our friends at Carbon Happy World for guiding us through the process.

We’d love to hear any thoughts that you might have about the details of our work so far - please do be in touch with us through our social channels (LinkedIn is best) or feel free to be in touch with Desert Vipers Head of Strategy & Sustainability, Matt Bailey at matt@thedesertvipers.com

We look forward to sharing more details across all aspects of our sustainability work over the coming months.

Dubai Sustainability Spotlight – The Dubai Sports Council

There’s so much great work being done in sustainability in Dubai. Ahead of Dubai’s hosting of COP28 in November / December, the UAE corporate community is getting firmly behind the transformation of the UAE to a more sustainable future – UAE companies such as COP28 Partners DP World (also ILT20 Title Sponsor), DEWA, E&, MASDAR, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Emirates NDB and Mashreq, amongst others, are taking the lead alongside international businesses like IBM, EY, INVESTCORP and Baker Hughes. We will use this blog to shine a sustainability spotlight on local people, companies and initiatives that catch our eye and for this first blog we are going right to the top and tipping our hat to the Dubai Sports Council:

Dubai Sports Council is the official sports governing body of the Government of Dubai. It is the lead entity tasked with developing a holistic sports culture for the Emirate. Sheikh Mansoor bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, Chairman of the Dubai Sports Council, revealed this year the objectives of a new 2023-2033 sports strategy for Dubai:

  • Double the sector’s contribution to annual GDP by 2033
  • Host 1,000 sports events per year:
    • Training camps
    • International events
    • Private sector sports events

Sheikh Mansoor said: “The new 2023-2033 strategy announced by the Council will seek to enhance the role of the sports sector in realising the vision of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and the objectives of the Dubai Economic Agenda (D33)”. Sheikh Mansoor highlighted the importance of implementing initiatives to achieve sustainability in the sports sector, in line with the vision of the UAE leadership and the directives of President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who announced 2023 as the ‘Year of Sustainability’. “The announcement reflects the UAE leadership’s commitment to implementing sustainability-focused initiatives that seek to ensure a better tomorrow for future generations. In line with the directives of the UAE President, we remain committed to promoting sustainability in the sports sector.”

Bravo to that!