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As the oldest ballpark in major league baseball, Fenway Park has endured a storied 110-year history.
But, Sam Kennedy, the president and CEO of the Boston Red Sox, says the park’s next chapter will largely be defined by its sustainability efforts. On Tuesday, it took a major step in that effort, signing a partnership with climate finance company Aspiration to put Fenway on a path to carbon neutrality, making the ballpark, famous for its Green Monster, even greener.
“It’s really hard to tackle renovations at a 100-year-old ballpark. That’s why we’ve been so focused on sustainability in all of our operations,” said Kennedy, in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “Now, we’re contributing on behalf of every single fan that comes into our ballpark in 2022 and beyond.”
Under the new partnership, the club will contribute a portion of each ticket sold to the Aspiration Planet Protection Fund, to purchase carbon credits. Those credits would offset electricity, water and gas usage, but also Scope 3 or indirect emissions from fans traveling to and from the games during the season, which makes up the largest chunk of Fenway’s carbon footprint.
Kennedy said the team would make a “substantial seven-figure contribution” but had no plans to pass that cost on to fans. Aspiration will decide where to apply those offsets.
“The planet protection contributions [will] go to fund high quality nature-based offsets that are in carbon credits that are being created in places around the world, whether it’s planting trees in the Amazon region or in Africa, whether it’s soil enhancement operations, whether it’s wind, and other things that are having additional positive impact that’s reducing carbon from the atmosphere… so, this is real, verified projects that are going to have a measurable impact,” said Andrei Cherny, Aspiration CEO.
The partnership marks the club’s latest effort to put Fenway on a path to sustainability. The park already offsets all of its electricity consumption with renewable energy. The Red Sox became the first MLB team to install solar panels in the park back in 2008. Seven years ago, it established a rooftop garden above the third base side of the park, to be used in food served at Fenway.
With carbon credits purchased through Aspiration offsetting the emissions of roughly 100 million visitors over the course of the six-month long baseball season, the contribution marks the club’s biggest commitment to reducing its carbon footprint.
“We don’t see it as a cost, but an investment in doing the right thing,” Kennedy said.
A ‘zero to one moment’ on climate
Cherny said there is a growing awareness among professional sports teams to establish more aggressive climate goals, in part because of pressure from fans. While the Red Sox partnership marks Aspiration’s first deal with an MLB team, it signed a 23-year arena sponsorship deal worth $300 million, with the Los Angeles Clippers last fall. The deal, crafted to align with the Clipper’s goal of operating its new Intuit Dome completely carbon free, also offers visibility for the Southern California-based company that has undergone massive growth since first opening for business back in 2015.
Backed by Robert Downey Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio, the firm issues debit cards with the promise of planting a tree for roughly every dollar spent, to offset a customer’s carbon footprint.
It also vows not to put money into funding the fossil fuel industry.
It secured $315 million in its most recent funding round, and announced a $2.3 billion SPAC merger with InterPrivate III Financial Partners last year, to go public.
“You’re seeing the zero to one moment where every business is having to ask the same question [about climate],” Cherny said. “Some of those businesses are going to be at the front end of that decision. But over the next few years, every business out there is going to have to grapple with those same questions.”
Akiko Fujita is an anchor and reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @AkikoFujita
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