Next Saturday’s big football game between the University of Florida and Florida State University has an environmental cost that can be measured in acres and years. That would be about 16 acres of forest, allowed to grow for 10 years, to absorb the carbon emissions generated by a single game.
The University of Florida has vowed to make the Gators-Seminoles game carbon-neutral — and it will be, thanks to two landowning donors and the activist organization Environmental Defense. The donors, Jim and Winston Bailey, have set aside 100 acres of pasture to be reforested for carbon sequestration. Environmental Defense will pay the Baileys a fair-market price for managing 16 of those acres over the next decade. That price is still being determined.
The rest of the acreage may be purchased by the university or other organizations for other offset programs. Part of the point of the project is to show that forests have value other than as pulp for paper, says Dedee DeLongpré, sustainability director at the University of Florida.
About 88,000 fans will travel from near and far to Gainesville on Saturday. Officials at the University of Florida estimate that all of that travel and tailgating, along with operating the stadium, will generate more than 1,650 tons of carbon emissions.
“Obviously, there is a lot of room for skepticism in this field, and we want to make sure that the calculations are as close as we can get them,” Ms. DeLongpré says. The calculations will be posted on the university’s Web site.
“The sticky, skeptical place that I don’t know how to answer is what happens at the end of the tree’s life when it falls over and begins to decay,” she says. When trees die and rot, they return carbon to the atmosphere.
Ms. DeLongpré says that if Florida were to do this again with another game, the university would rerun all of the calculations, but she assumes that the games generate about the same amount of emissions every time.
“I hope this gets people’s attention,” Ms. DeLongpré says. “I hope other people say to themselves: ‘Seven home games at 16 acres equals 112 acres for 10 years, and what if we wanted to do all the teams in the division? That’s a lot of forest. And then what do we do next year?’”
The project raises hard questions about how to deal with the problem of carbon emissions on campuses. Taking out incandescent light bulbs and running more efficient appliances are everyday ways to cut emissions at a college, “but what do you do about an athletic game?” Ms. DeLongpré says. —Scott Carlson
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