Cricket must rethink sponsorship deals amid ongoing climate crisis

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In 1962 the London Royal College of Physicians published an in-depth and groundbreaking report on the dangers of smoking to human health. Ten years later the Benson & Hedges Cup was born – a sponsorship deal between a tobacco company and cricket that lasted 30 years.

The Sunday League knockabout was sponsored by John Player between 1969 and 1986, ciggies given out willy-nilly in dressing rooms from Headingley to Hove, 1980s all-rounders battled it out for the Silk Cut Challenge, while the 1992 and 1996 Cricket World Cups were sponsored by B&H and Wills cigarettes. So it went on, in as many sports as you could mention, until a ban on tobacco sponsorship and sport kicked in UK-wide in 2002.

Meanwhile, in 1958, Dr Charles David Keeling, a young geochemist, found evidence that CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere were rising and attributed it to the burning of fossil fuels. By 1967 scientists had produced the first computer model of Earth’s changing climate, which predicted that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise global temperatures by two degrees centigrade, and in 1968 a glaciologist was predicting the melting of the polar ice caps.

Yet in 2022, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning the world has to act “now or never” to hold off disaster and keep the rise in temperatures close to 1.5C, the UN secretary general António Guterres warning that fossil fuels companies and their financers “have humanity by the throat”, and the world on the edge of a sixth mass extinction event, fossil fuel companies are