We suffered an early setback in our quest to win the 2024 DP World ILT20 trophy yesterday, losing to Abu Dhabi Knight Riders in our first match. It is a long journey ahead though and the team will look to get back to winning ways on Wednesday.
We did, however, achieve some notable successes when it comes to our efforts to show a new approach to water and single use plastic in cricket. Readers of this blog will know that one of our objectives is to eradicate single use plastic from our team environment. After months of planning, we unveiled our beautiful Bluewater water stations and refillable bottles on the field of play and these will be visible to a television audience of 300m+ people over the course of the tournament. You can read more about this here. Thank you to everyone in the team involved with this, as it has been operationally challenging to achieve.
Another win that unfortunately, we can’t broadcast to such a huge audience was our use of biofuels in the team bus that transports players and coaches to and from the stadium. The use of biofuels will result in reduced emissions from the team bus by roughly 80% – a phenomenal reduction.
This progress is not the main point of today’s blog though, for yesterday we took a very significant decision that probably has many observers scratching their heads. The match was also used as an opportunity for Desert Vipers to showcase their sustainability targets and their long-term commitment to their sustainability journey. In several locations within the stadium, their ‘Net Zero 2040’ pledge was demonstrably visual - LED boards, the “Jumbotron” and the fan jerseys that we distributed to our supporters being perhaps the most notable examples. This pledge shows our commitment to the United Nations Sports for Climate Action Framework, to which the Desert Vipers are Dubai’s first signatory and Asia’s first cricket signatory. As part of our commitment to this framework, Desert Vipers must reduce our emissions by 50% by 2030, reach Net Zero by 2040, and report annually on our emissions to the United Nations. We are also bound to use our position to educate the community. During the match, viewers will have seen this commitment in another very visual location: on the front of our playing jersey. Desert Vipers took the decision to have ‘Net Zero 2040’ on the match jersey in a first-of-its-kind in global sports, choosing to show our commitment to sustainability.
This “pledge” will remain on our jersey for at least Wednesday’s game. Traditionally, these prime advertising positions are sold to sponsors, and the front of our jersey is the most valuable position that we have to sell. It is not the case that Desert Vipers received no offers from prospective sponsors for this position. Rather, for at least the first few ILT20 matches we have chosen to show the world what we stand for. From a media value perspective, that’s $2m per match of media value that we are investing in our Net Zero pledge. We remain in the hunt for a partner that sees what we are doing and wishes to partner with us and work with us according to mutual objectives. At this point in time, we will move our “NetZero 2040” to a new position on our shirt, or double up our efforts to communicate our carbon emission reduction progress in other ways. Until then, we are proud to show what we stand for, slap bang in the middle of our shirt.
