Sustainability Governance

The Sustainability Steering Group, made up of senior executives and management representatives from key sustainability-related functions at FIFA, Q22 and the SC was tasked with ensuring the successful delivery of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ sustainability strategy. This included providing strategic guidance, approving the strategy and policy, reviewing performance against sustainability commitments, objectives and targets, and ensuring that adequate resources are engaged to deliver against them.

The Group included the Q22 CEO, as co-chair, the Q22 Deputy CEO, as well other senior executives with deep knowledge on environmental sustainability, inclusivity and accessibility, workers’ welfare, media rights, stadium construction and operations, community programmes and governance. With its collective knowledge, skills, and experience on sustainable development, the Group’s meetings focussed on strategic plans to manage the material topics of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ Sustainability Strategy, as well as monitoring progress. Members of the Group had access and reported progress to the FIFA Secretary General, the SC’s Secretary General and Q22 Chairman, which in turn were part of higher governance bodies.

Based on clear Terms of Reference (ToR), the Steering Group met eight times from 2019 to 2023. Documentation circulated for the meetings included a summary status of the implementation of the Sustainability Strategy, discussion papers and presentations including background information and requests for decisions and actions. Minutes of each meeting were recorded and shared with the Steering Group members for follow up. Also, as per the ToR, membership was reviewed periodically by the members and the co-chairs but no changes were considered necessary.

Whilst having the Steering Group required a significant time commitment, it enabled all aspects of the joint Sustainability Strategy to be discussed at a senior level and provided access to decision makers to effectively address issues hindering the implementation of the Strategy.

The joint FIFA-Q22-SC Sustainability Working Group brought together all responsible parties in charge of the implementation of the sustainability policy and strategy, and of providing guidance and support to project teams where needed to enable delivery of related projects. The group was composed of sustainability experts across all priority sustainability topics, including members of FIFA’s Sustainability & Environment and Human Rights & Anti-discrimination teams, the Q22 Sustainability team, the SC Sustainability team and from other functional areas across the organisations leading or supporting the delivery of particular initiatives covered by the strategy.

Initial versions of the Sustainability Working Group started in 2015 and predominately focused on meetings to discuss progress of projects being implemented by the SC and learnings from previous FIFA World Cups. Once the strategy was developed in 2017, and a more detailed implementation plan in 2018, topic specific task forces (e.g. Sustainable Procurement, Accessibility, Human Rights, and others) were set up to facilitate the implementation of related initiatives. Pillar review meetings later became one of the main forums to bring together working group members to discuss progress across most initiatives covered by the sustainability strategy.