Digital Carbon Justice in Sport

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a novel theoretical framework (digital carbon justice) and empirical evidence on rebound and displacement effects in digital sport ecosystems.

🏢実務担当者:Sports organizations can use eco-default streaming and consider full life-cycle impacts, including e-waste and grid factors, to improve sustainability claims.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for robust assurance and life-cycle accounting in digital sustainability claims, relevant for disclosure regulations.

<p>Digital delivery is increasingly promoted as a decarbonization pathway in contemporary sport; however, its carbon, water, and material impacts may be displaced across infrastructures, jurisdictions, and social groups rather than reduced in net terms. This study develops digital carbon justice (DCJ) as a bounded middle-range theory that explains how substitution–rebound dynamics, infrastructural siting, life-cycle leakage, governance design, and accounting regimes jointly shape the distribution of environmental burdens in digitally mediated sport ecosystems. We integrated device-side telemetry, location-specific grid factors, content delivery routing data, and organizational disclosures from <span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">2019</span> to <span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">2025</span> across <span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">5</span>.<span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">92</span> million streaming sessions, representing <span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">102</span>.<span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">4</span> million viewer-minutes from eleven professional football clubs and<span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);"> five </span>esports organizers in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Causal identification combines large-scale randomized field experiments with staggered adoption designs, while mechanisms are examined through agent-based simulation and computational text analysis. Eco-default streaming reduces energy per viewer-minute and emissions per session by approximately <span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">4</span>% to <span style="color: rgb(1, 0, 0);">6</span>%, with negligible impact on engagement. However, gains attenuate at high bitrates, during extended viewing, and in virtual reality, indicating a conditional and partially governable rebound. Identical events routed through carbon-intensive grids or water-stressed basins exhibit materially higher footprints, evidencing infrastructural displacement. In esports, device churn is associated with elevated e-waste leakage risks in weaker regulatory contexts, partially mitigated by take-back schemes. Sustainability claims are negatively associated with verified performance under market-based accounting and omission of life-cycle dimensions, while independent assurance narrows disclosure–performance gaps. Simulation results show that substantial seasonal reductions materialize only when behavioral containment is paired with cleaner infrastructural siting. Digital decarbonization in sport is therefore governance-dependent rather than automatic. The findings position DCJ as a justice-centered framework for evaluating when digital sport reduces environmental burdens and when it redistributes them.</p>

• openalex https://doi.org/10.18848/2152-7857/cgp/a402first seen 2026-05-05 19:14:09