ICC/Aramco Deal: No Cricket on a Dead Planet
The Next Test, a non-profit working to raise awareness of the climate crisis within cricket, today condemns the ICC’s sponsorship renewal with Aramco as a “complete dereliction of their duties as a governing body.”
The ICC confirmed on Thursday May 9, after months of stalling, that they would be renewing their sponsorship deal with Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil and gas company.
This sponsorship will encompass all the U19, men’s and women’s competitions up to 2027, including the men’s T20 World Cup in America and the Caribbean starting on June 2.
That the ICC has chosen to renew its deal with Aramco, the world’s largest global emitter, is a complete dereliction of their duties as a governing body. They signed in full knowledge of cricket’s status as the pitch sport hardest hit by the climate crisis, the climate vulnerability of many of their playing members and the concerns of their own players over air pollution - much of which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Aramco are estimated to be responsible for over 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1965, and have a long history of trying to derail efforts to tackle climate change . Their CEO Amin H Nasser said in March 2024 that “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” This despite desperate pleas from the UN that the world is heading towards irreversible climate breakdown, the International Energy Authority’s call for the immediate end to new oil and gas projects and the continued obstruction of the fossil fuel industry to plans to move to a clean transition.
A new study by LINGO revealed that Aramco’s 24 largest projects (known as carbon bombs) are expected to cause USD 45 trillion in damages and 24 million excess deaths globally over the next decades if their oil and gas get extracted and burnt.. That’s the equivalent of wiping out the populations of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia and costing 15 times the GDP of the UK. The climate damage Saudi Arabia is set to inflict on itself alone is more than USD 5 trillion by setting off its carbon bombs.
FIFA also recently signed a deal with Aramco, leading to accusations of sportswashing.
Saudi Aramco, who plan to keep countries in Africa and Asia dependent on fossil fuels, are increasingly buying up sports in an effort to greenwash their reputation. The ICC’s deal with Aramco follows fast in the footsteps of FIFA’s partnership, and deals with F1 2 and 3, Aston Martin, Concacaf, the Ladies European Golf Tour, the Diriyah Tennis Cup, and further deals within Esports, boxing, wrestling, basketball and athletics.
Cricket’s vulnerability to the changing climate is well known, from the increased risk of hurricanes in the Caribbean - Hurricane Mara destroying the Windsor Park Cricket Stadium in Dominica - to drought in South Africa, which led to school and club cricket being cancelled, bush fire smoke in Australia disrupting games, flooding in Bangladesh and Pakistan and extreme heat worldwide, particularly in South Asia, which is currently suffering an intense heatwave. The UK has just endured its 18 wettest months on record, which left many cricket clubs unable to play in April and ground staff at first-class level despairing at their task.
The 2019 Hit for Six report examined the physical and psychological risks to cricketers from intense heat, from heatstroke to impaired decision-making, something that led the late Shane Warne to speak about his concerns.
Warne called for cricket authorities to be “proactive not reactive” about the threat of the climate emergency, after reading the Hit for Six report as a member of the MCC World Committee.
“Before I’d seen the report I hadn’t really thought about how it would impact the game of cricket,” he said. “Some of the stuff that we were presented with: how hot it was for some of the players at certain times – up to 50 degrees in the middle – how dangerous it was for them. How the risks affects local club cricket, how clubs have had their changing rooms destroyed by flooding in the UK, how the rising temperatures affect the way grass grows, was scary.
“People want to put their head in the sand, and say I’m not going to be around in 50 years. That’s just wrong.”
Five years later, the ICC are doing exactly that.
What you can do:
Contact the ICC to protest
Make noise on social media with the hashtag #cleanupcricket
Check that your pensions are not inadvertently funding fossil fuels
