The World Cup of Climate Injustice
In 9 months time, football fans from around the world will congregate in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, the first rendition of the tournament to take place in the winter of the northern hemisphere. As an expected 1.5 million fans pour into Doha for the quadrennial celebration of the world’s sport, few will think about what it took to prepare since Qatar was announced as the host by FIFA in 2010, which some countries decried was the result of alleged corruption.
Qatar, which has some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves on earth despite its diminutive size, is the richest country in the world based on GDP per capita. The 12% of people in Qatar who are actually Qatari citizens receive free water, electricity, and health care, as well as pension checks and very low loan rates as the government spreads the massive amount of wealth it gains from its natural gas reserves that are the third largest in the world. The other 88% of the inhabitants of Qatar, who make up 95% of Qatar’s workforce, are migrants.
When the world’s best players take the field in November, they will be playing in stadiums that at least 6,500 migrant workers died to build. It is believed that the number could actually be much higher, Of the countries that sent a large number of migrant workers to Qatar, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are the only ones that actually kept track of how many of their citizens have died. Since 2010, an average of 12 people have died each week constructing the World Cup infrastructure from these five countries alone. Other countries with a large number of workers in Qatar, including The Philippines and Kenya, have not kept track of fatalities. On average nearly two workers have passed away daily, listed officially as ‘natural causes.’
The cheapest ticket to the World Cup, which comes in at $302, costs more than what those migrant workers made in an entire month. Human rights groups have criticized Qatar’s record of migrant rights and labor laws, where workers have not been paid, or when they are, it’s an abysmal minimum wage, which was only made effective in 2021. The actual conditions in which the migrant workers are living can only be described as extremely abusive.
Migrants have to bus upwards of 2 hours from their labor camps to the construction site. They then work long hours in averages of 95 degrees F, 35 degrees C summer heat, building not only football stadiums but hotels, roads, an airport, and a new state-of-the-art public transportation system as well. When that work is done, they are bussed back to their labor camp where they live 10-12 to a room with very little food, poor sanitation, and often no electricity.
Officially, there have been just 37 deaths linked to the construction project, and 34 of those have been called ‘non-work-related.’ Because Qatar does not require post-mortem autopsies, migrant workers are recorded as natural deaths with no oversight. In reality, bus crashes, workplace accidents, heat exhaustion, suicide, and a slew of other causes related to their working and living conditions are the real reasons for those 6,500 deaths.
A 2019 Guardian analysis revealed migrant workers were dying in record numbers due to heat stress. Summer temperatures reached peaks of 113 degrees F, 45 degrees Celsius, which proved fatal for migrants, tolling for upwards of 10 hours a day during Qatar’s construction boom ahead of the World Cup. Although Qatari authorities claimed to protect migrants through a ban from working outdoors from 11:30 to 3 pm from mid-June to August, the Guardian’s analysis over a nine-year period showed the ban did not in fact keep workers safe. In fact, working outdoors outside the ban hours exposed migrants to potentially fatal levels of heat exposure between June and September. The analysis also revealed the heat danger continued into the cooler months.
Doctors in Nepal are reporting high rates of kidney disease, even kidney failure, among young Nepali men returning from World Cup construction work in Qatar’s dangerous heat conditions. More than a dozen doctors and public health experts said they see new cases every month - as many as ten a week - adding that the problem was becoming acute, with migrant workers at higher-risk of kidney failure than the general Nepali population. Workers reported 12 hour shifts in the heat, with requests for lavatory use often denied. Two mixed meals in bags were provided per day and days off were few. Workers reported delays with replenishing drinking water that frequently ran out.
So how have Qatar and the construction companies been able to get away with such awful conditions in the decade since being awarded the World Cup? A system used widely called the kafala (sponsorship) allowed companies to take virtually complete control over the immigration and employment status of their migrant workers. Under this system, the workers were not protected by the host country’s labor laws and they had to gain the permission of their employer to change jobs. This left them wide open for exploitation, especially considering a very common practice was for the employer to keep the worker’s passport and forms of documentation so that they were trapped with the employer.
In 2020 and 2021, after years of pressure by NGOs and human rights organizations, and with the eyes of the world increasingly turning toward the country as the tournament approached, Qatar made multiple improvements to its labor laws, but close scrutiny and critiques remain. One of these reforms was to dismantle the longstanding and highly criticized kafala system. Other reforms include raising the minimum wage to $274 a month as well as providing additional provisions for accommodations and food.
Southern Asia, where many of the migrant workers are from, is an area heavily affected by climate change. Rising sea levels are eroding the land that coastal villagers used to inhabit, flooding former agricultural land, and making the water too saline to drink. The Indian government has been slow, unorganized, and ineffective in its attempt to help relocate families and their economic outlook is suffering because of it. It is this grim outlook in the poorest regions of Southeast Asia that are driving so many young men into construction work in Qatar, but not only, for women and girls fill many domestic labor positions in Qatar.
The state of Odisha is one of the poorest in India, has a deep history of migrant workers looking for opportunity elsewhere, and is one of the most vulnerable regions of India to climate change. Sadashiv Das was a 26 year old from Odisha who, early in 2021, followed in the path of millions of others to the construction sites of Qatar. Nine months later, his body was returned home only after a prominent Indian politician wrote to their consulate in Qatar. Thousands have been driven from southeast Asia by cyclones, droughts, and floods in search of better opportunity, only for their lives to be cut short by a brutal and exploitative system that tends to apply to most migrant workers, regardless of industry.
Within the last few weeks, the Biden administration designated Qatar as a “major non-NATO ally” with the president signaling close ties based on the “importance of our relationship”, with plans to open up more cooperation and investment. This is hardly a surprise as Qatar’s oil reserves are almost as large as US stockpiles, and its natural gas reserves much larger, despite the gulf nation being only about twice as large as Delaware. With Russia, one of Europe’s largest natural gas providers, on the brink of conflict with NATO, President Biden is trying to open up more avenues for his allies' natural gas needs.
There has also been minimal pushback to the upcoming World Cup in the international football world. Over the World Cup qualifying period, countries including Germany, The Netherlands, and Norway have staged on-field protests against Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers, but there has been very little to suggest that any football federation will boycott the games
The story of the migrant workers in Qatar is a story of climate injustice. The interconnected nature of the climate crisis forces impoverished people from areas heavily affected by climate change such as Odisha to leave their homes in search of work. When they do, they are regarded as economic migrants, and regardless of classification or recent Qatari reforms, their migrant and labor rights are insufficiently upheld.
They are often pushed to migrate because they and their countries lack the resources and support to adapt and build climate resilience to increasing disasters. Their destination is one of the hottest countries on earth and has a distinct lack of arable land, freshwater, and carbon sinks. However, what Qatar does have is incalculable fortunes underneath its land. These natural gas reserves have led to great wealth for a small state-sanctioned population, built on extraction and exploitation. In the process, it has quite possibly blinded Qataris to the very real climate concerns the country and all its residents will bear.
With assistance by Amali Tower