Environmental damage is one of those topics that is used widely in the media as an indicator of our impact on the planet. Wildfires, deforestation, you name it, we’ve measured it. We measure it in many different ways, like trees cut down per second, the size of the area deforested compared to country sizes, and the one I see the most – the size of the area destroyed described through the corresponding number of football fields or pitches. This has always seemed slightly bizarre to me, so this week I thought I’d dive into why this is something we see.
So, first of all, let’s go through what kind of things are measured in football fields. The one I’ve seen the most is deforestation. Headlines like ‘The Amazon Has Lost More Than Ten Million Football Fields of Forest in a Decade‘ or ‘Football pitch-sized area of tropical rainforest lost every six seconds‘ are a staple in climate communications. Another one is fire. This can sometimes be linked to forests, like ‘Cairngorms National Park wildfire: Seven football pitches worth of forest destroyed in Scottish wildfire’ or it can be another type of land area, such as ‘Bury fire: Crews tackle blaze ‘size of a football pitch’‘, which was about a landfill site. Football pitches aren’t just reserved for land areas either, they are also often used for things like boats, or aircraft carriers, such as this one – ‘Aircraft carrier the size of three football fields has its own library and general store’ . You get the picture – it can be used to measure practically anything.
There’s a pretty simple reason for the use of the football field measurement. If I say that an area 7,140 square metres large has been damaged, can you picture it? Probably not. Whereas, if I say 1 football pitch, you probably can. Maybe not precisely, but better than you can guess any other measurement. That’s good right?
Well, potentially yes, but possibly no. A first big issue with this is that not all football pitches are the same size! I didn’t know that until researching for this post, and it seems odd to me for many logistical reasons, but it also makes the use of football pitches as a measurement a big issue – what size of pitch are you talking about?! A football pitch in the UK has to be between 90m and 120m in length, and between 45m and 90m in width. So theoretically, one article could be talking about a 90m by 45m pitch, whilst another may refer to one that is 120m by 90m – that’s a huge difference!
As you can see from the headlines I discussed earlier, this measurement is mostly used in sensational headlines. And, although I’m sure you can picture one football field, I’m less sure that you can actually picture 40. There’s a similar problem here when using countries as guidance for the size of destruction – does anyone truly know how big Wales actually is? I’m half Welsh, and although I have an idea of how large Wales is, I wouldn’t be able to confidently draw it to scale, guess how large it is in any measurement, or compare it to the size of many other countries. So, whilst perhaps one football field is a good measure, when this is scaled up it probably makes less sense.
This next point is my opinion, not something I’ve seen anywhere else, but I feel like the overuse of football fields as a measurement has led to somewhat of an unfeeling response. Over time, the repetition of a statistic can lose it’s meaning, because we get used to it. Another example of this is the reaction to deaths associated with covid-19 – whilst we react emotionally to one death, the deaths of larger numbers produce a numbed response, and become just a statistic. So, it’s possible that the football field measurement means less and less every time we use it.
So, whilst the football pitch measurement is somewhat sensible, it’s definitely not perfect. To me, it’s another example of where the media use sensational headlines, often without then providing adequate information, and always without providing any solutions. If we’re going to use these sorts of statistics, perhaps we should back them up.
Thanks for reading! What are your thoughts on the football pitch measurement?
Waste Makes Waste 