BP Centers 2012 Olympics Partnership Around World Record Attempt

(ATR) BP's partnership director for London 2012 tells Around the Rings "there would be nothing better" than to handover to future Olympic organizers a world record for most ticket holders offsetting their travel carbon to a single event.

"That would be a great legacy," Mike Sharrock told ATR hours after BP unveiled Thursday the centerpiece of its 2012 activation plans.

From wind farming in New Caledonia to landfill gas utilization in Turkey, BP is investing in sustainability projects worldwide to make up for the environmental harm that will come hand-in-hand with Games goers converging on London next year.

According to Sharrock, it's as easy as 1-2-3 for ticket holders. "We then do the rest," he says.

Around the Rings: BP Target Neutral is trying to set a new world record for the most number of people offsetting their travel carbon to a single event. What holds the current world record?

Mike Sharrock: The checks we’ve done say there isn’t a current world record, so we’re creating a world record here. That’s really the call to action is for all ticketed spectators from around the world to join together and collectively do something quite special, which is to offset their journey to the Games.

ATR: Besides the invitation sent Monday from LOCOG to Olympic ticketholders asking them to actually take part, what else will BP do to make the world record a reality?

MS: First thing is we’ve been working very closely with LOCOG, and this is very much a part of supporting the LOCOG agenda for a more sustainable Games and as sustainable a Games as possible.

The email is a direct call to all those who have so far registered for tickets. There will be subsequent times over the coming months when LOCOG will do something similar in a very targeted way, so there will be further direct opportunities to communicate with ticketholders.

Target Neutral has been up and running since 2006, and what we’ve done is create a new way of calculating your emissions. With the Olympics, we felt the opportunity to do something different and engage more people. If you add up the individual journeys that are made, that is a considerable amount of carbon.

So what we’ve done is spend quite a bit of time investing in some new infrastructure up front to create a calculator which is very much journey-specific.

We’ll set up a new website for it, and we’ll be communicating quite strongly over the coming months and finding new ways to try to engage people. Most importantly, if people sign up, we’ll be supporting that by funding the cost of the offsets. Our hope is that as many of the 10 million or so people that are coming to the Games as possible will offset, and the more that do, the more that will then be invested in the offsetting projects around the world.

ATR: What else besides the Target Neutral campaign is BP doing to support London 2012’s much broader ambition to stage the most sustainable Games possible?

MS: We’re really proud of the role that we’re playing with London 2012, and we are very deeply committed to try and support that agenda as much as we can.

Our practical role at the Games as the oil and gas partner is to provide the fuel for the 5,000 Games vehicles, and so we will be providing the most advanced, best fuels that are available in 2012, but we’ll also be taking the opportunity to show our view of the best fueling solutions for the next 10 to 15 years, and so we’ll be developing some new advanced fuels and advanced biofuels in time for London 2012.

Then as the offsetting partner, we’re going to make sure that we offset the CO2 from those vehicles. Effectively, the 5,000 vehicles will be fully offset, and that we believe gives us the right then to go out and engage the spectators in this new world record attempt and get many more people involved as well.

But the sustainability agenda goes more widely than that because [both BP and LOCOG] look quite broadly around sustainability in terms of social sustainability and economic sustainability as well, so we’re very heavily involved with LOCOG on a number ofprojects around the world.

The Olympics and Paralympics give us an opportunity to perhaps step out a little more and go a little bit further in some areas and use that inspiration of the Games to do some special things.

ATR: Does either Sochi 2014 or Rio 2016 have an official offset partner, to your knowledge?

MS: I don’t believe either of them does, and hopefully the programs that we’re running here can inspire other people to do something similar. It would be great to be able to hand over a world record for the next Olympics to beat. There would be nothing better than that. That would be a great legacy.

ATR: Is BP interested in sponsorships with Sochi or Rio?

MS: We haven’t been in any discussions so far with either of those organizing committees about that.

ATR: In layman’s terms, how exactly does the average ticketholder go about offsetting his or her travel carbon en route to next year’s Games?

MS: We’re keeping it very very simple for everybody, so all they need to go is go onto the Target Neutral website, and three quick clicks will do it for them.

What we need to do is verify who they are and that they are indeed a ticketed spectator coming to the Games. They need to tell us where they’re coming from, and we thencalculate based on that the amount of CO2 that will be produced as a result of the Games, and if they’re coming with other people, then we’ll calculate their footprint too, and we then do the rest, so that’s all the ticketed spectator needs to do.

It’s really about trying to engage hopefully millions of people in the subject of carbon and in understanding the role of offsetting but also about getting people to think about the journeys they make and the impact that their travel has on the environment.

In terms of what actually happens with the offsets, BP will invest to offset the tons that are created in people traveling to the Games. We will offset a similar amount of tons in projects that either reduce CO2 that would otherwise produced or avoid CO2 being produced in the first place or absorb the CO2. These are real investments that get made, and because Target Neutral is a nonprofit scheme, all of the money that gets raised goes directly into the projects. BP effectively pays and administers for the Target Neutral program, and that doesn’t come out of the investments that get made.

ATR: In extremely general terms, am I right that offsetting basically just means trying to do enough good stuff to the environment to make up for the bad stuff?

MS: The way we would talk about offsetting is that we do recognize that there is a consequence of travel on the environment, and an Olympic Games requires millions of people to travel. You can do a lot, and we would certainly support all the steps that are being taken to promote public transport and promote more efficient ways of travel, but ultimately if someone’s coming from the United States or coming from Australia, chances are they’re going to get on an airplane to travel, and that does have a consequence.

Our view is that it’s really important to focus on how can you reduce the impact of that travel through better quality fuels and more efficient ways of traveling, but ultimately there will still be a residual, and offsetting is a way of compensating for what is left.

ATR: So it’s basically a) trying to minimize the harm and b) trying to make up for what little harm is left?

MS: That’s correct, and this is one of the great things about the Olympics and the Paralympics is that they do inspire people to try and do things that they otherwise perhaps wouldn’t normally do. What we’re hoping is that people traveling to the Games will get behind this idea of creating a world record and have a bit of fun because that’s also part of this.

Interview conducted by Matthew Grayson

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