Stefan Wagner elected to DFL Sustainability Commission

Stefan! Many congratulations on being elected to the Sustainability Commission. You've initially been elected for three years. How many members does the Sustainability Commission have and what are its responsibilities?

"This newly created commission of one of the German Football League's (DFL) eight official advisory bodies. Anne-Kathrin Laufmann (Werder Bremen), Marieke Johanne Patyna (Hamburger SV), Marieke Köhler (Borussia Dortmund) and Neele Rickers (SC Paderborn) were voted in too. Five more members had already been elected. We will work very intensively on strengthening professional football's commitment to sustainability."

The goal is for professional clubs to become more sustainability, with the first minimum criteria to apply from the 2023/24 season. What are those criteria?

"In total, there are more than 100 criteria that will be introduced step-by-step in March 2023 and September 2023. They cover all the essential ecological, economic and social elements of sustainability. For example, we're working on a new mobility concept for travel to and from the PreZero Arena. Some people might say: "That'll be a while coming." And that's true, but each and every fan can already contribute now: we have a hep climate ticket: buy a ticket for a TSG home game and support social projects by paying an extra €1. Together with our partner PreZero, we're making the PreZero Arena into the first zero-waste stadium in the Bundesliga. We want to contribute and pass on our experience in this area. In addition, the catalogue of criteria includes the many issues surrounding resources, energy and CO2 emissions."

Let's fast-forward to the year 2030. Will TSG be climate-neutral by then? 

"As the term is somewhat vague, we need to be a bit more specific here. A certain scope of our actions have already been "balance-sheet climate-neutral" since 2019. Basically, this is our energy consumption aside from our self-produced solar energy, our vehicle fleet and our own travel. In the professional business, longer air travel is required. Particularly if we – as we hope to do – quality for an international competition again. That means that we offset our footprint by undertaking projects that demonstrably save the same amount of emissions – a current example would be the protection of the last remaining rainforest in Kenya. There's still a long way to go before reaching our so-called "net zero" target: to achieve this, we'd effectively need to reduce over 90% of our current emissions and only then could the rest be offset. We want to achieve that by 2040; by 2030, we want to achieve a reduction of 50%."