On Tuesday June 24, 2026, as Canada and Switzerland faced off at BC Place, the outdoor temperature in Vancouver reached 27.7°C. It was the warmest June 24 in Vancouver in more than a century. That same day, a total of 21 communities across British Columbia reached or surpassed all-time daily heat records. June 2026 also marks exactly five years since the 2021 Western heat dome: the deadliest weather event in Canada in history, during which the BC Coroners Service reported a total of 619 heat-related deaths over a period of less than a week.

But extreme heat in Vancouver means something different today than it did five years ago for at least two reasons. One: we are five years further into a global climate crisis that is driving ever-increasing temperatures, sea level rise, and deadlier weather events like wildfires. It is no longer possible to ignore that extreme heat in Vancouver in June is a direct manifestation of that broader crisis. Two: extreme heat in summer 2026 comes as Vancouver hosts the largest sporting event in world history.

This is Part 3 of Pivot’s FIFA on the Block Series. This blog addresses the pernicious relationship between FIFA and climate change, at the heart of which lies a bitter irony. On the one hand, climate change is dramatically disrupting the Games and its impacts; interfering with the matches played inside the stadium and exacerbating the human rights impacts for Vancouver’s residents outside of it. But at the same time, as the single highest carbon-emitting sporting event in history, FIFA is an engine pushing us further into climate catastrophe.

Click here to read Part 1 | Click here to read Part 2

Heat Risks Inside the FIFA Stadium

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is unique in its geographic reach, with matches spread out over 16 host cities that span Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Though environmental conditions vary significantly across the 16 host cities, at least 10 out of 16 are at “very high” risk of extreme heat stress during the event period. Host cities located in the southern United States and Mexico are particularly vulnerable to prolonged periods of extreme heat throughout the Games. Heat-trapping pollution from burning oil, coal, and gas is the largest contributor to extreme heat across all host cities.

Extreme heat endangers the health of those inside FIFA stadiums, including players, match officials, and stadium workers. In May 2026, a month before World Cup kick-off, a group of global medical and public health professionals wrote an open letter (the “Open Letter”) to FIFA about their concerns for the health, safety, and wellbeing of players and match officials due to the “worrying levels of heat stress they could be exposed to” during the Games. The authors refer to wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a marker that accounts for the combined effects of air temperature, humidity, wind, and sunlight on the human body. Their letter points out that the International Federation of Professional Footballers (FIFPRO) has issued standards that recommend that football matches be postponed once WGBT exceeds 28°C, due to health risks for players and match officials. But FIFA declined to adopt this widely accepted, evidence-based benchmark for the 2026 World Cup.

FIFA did introduce a mandatory 3-minute break for all matches during the 2026 World Cup (regardless of WGBT), ostensibly to promote player safety and well-being. However, critics have cast doubt on FIFA’s true motives for such a measure, arguing that it was motivated more by accruing advertising dollars (3-minute breaks provide further opportunities for televised commercial breaks) than about mitigating heat stress. The effectiveness of the mandatory 3-minute break is equally dubious: the Open Letter points out that 3 minutes is “too short to have a meaningful impact on rehydration and body cooling” – processes that need at least 6 minutes to kick in.

FIFA’s Emergency Care Manual for the 2026 World Cup states that if WGBT reaches more than 32°C, two 3-minute cooling breaks are mandatory per match, rather than the standard one. But even at 32°C (4° higher than FIFPRO’s threshold for postponement), whether or not the match proceeds is entirely at the discretion of FIFA’s management team. According to the Open Letter, asking players to compete at a WGBT of 32°C or above is “impossible to justify.”

Though there seems to be much public concern about the impact of extreme heat on players, far less is paid to the workers at FIFA stadiums and other official event venues. A tournament of the scale of the 2026 World Cup depends on a massive labour force across all 16 host cities. Although FIFA’s Human Rights Framework speaks to workers’ rights, demonstrating FIFA’s supposed commitment to fair wages and collective bargaining rights, it is silent on protections against heat stress, including water breaks and access to cooling infrastructure. 11 of the 16 host stadiums, moreover, are open-air and without climate control, increasing the risk of workers’ exposure to extreme heat and ultimately jeopardizing the health of the very workers whose labour underlies the tournament.

Heat Risks Outside the FIFA Stadium

Extreme heat during the FIFA event period transcends the physical stadium, spilling into the streets and impacting those who are already navigating FIFA-related disruptions to daily life. Climatic vulnerability – including extreme heat exposure – is not distributed evenly. Instead, climate change intersects with other forms of social injustice, including poverty, criminalization, and housing precarity. In Vancouver, this means that poor, unhoused or precariously housed, Indigenous, racialized, and 2SLGBTQ+ people disproportionately experience both chronic and acute manifestations of climate change, including extreme weather, floods and fire disasters, and food insecurity. Not only is the Downtown Eastside (DTES) home to many such communities, but it is also an urban heat island. This means that the area has consistently higher temperatures compared to other neighbourhoods in Vancouver, largely because of high building density and low level of greenspace in the area. Despite the acute impacts of extreme weather on the DTES, the neighbourhood continues to be underserved, with what nominal services and supports it does have being regularly shuttered and defunded by the City and Province.

In the DTES, extreme heat and FIFA-related impacts dovetail to produce specific and intersectional harms.

First, extreme heat makes FIFA-induced displacement more dangerous. As we have previously written, FIFA drives displacement for people who shelter outside, by way of increased policing and the enforcement of new and existing bylaws. Hot and humid temperatures intensify the physical strain of packing up one’s belongings and being constantly on the move. FIFA-related crackdowns on the use of public space also make it more likely that police and/or city workers confiscate people’s belongings, including their sheltering equipment and other items they use to cool themselves. Green spaces that ordinarily serve as refuges during hot weather, such as forested parks or streets that provide shading, are also less likely to be accessible for people during a time of increased surveillance. These conditions are emblematic of the intersection between housing injustice and climate injustice: the lack of access to adequate housing directly intensifies climatic exposure.

Second, residents with housing may choose to remain indoors to avoid FIFA-related surveillance. For residents in low-income housing, however, indoors is precisely where they are most vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat. 98% of the people who died in BC’s 2021 heat dome died inside of their own homes. Unsurprisingly, “most were older, poor, lived alone, and lacked social connections.” The vast majority of fatal drug poisoning deaths in BC also occur indoors when people use alone in private residences.

Low-income housing in the DTES often lacks air conditioning, proper ventilation and air filtration, and common spaces that double as “cool rooms”, all of which mediate the impacts of extreme heat on tenants’ health. As a result, the temperatures inside low-income housing complexes in the DTES are consistently hotter than the temperatures outdoors. Overnight heat is sometimes so bad that tenants cannot sleep in their homes: 40% of tenants surveyed by the SRO Collaborative in 2022 reported leaving their housing to sleep at night because of the intolerable heat indoors, with the majority opting to shelter outdoors in parks. FIFA, however, changes the calculus, as crackdowns on the use of public space make sheltering outdoors overnight a less viable alternative. Tenants are thereby forced to choose between two evils: the extreme heat inside of their homes, or the risk of criminalization outside of them.

A study led by researchers at UBC and community researchers at EIDGE (Eastside Illicit Drinkers Group for Education) is currently examining how both extreme heat and FIFA are affecting residents of the DTES who spend significant time outside. Participants fill out a daily diary that seeks to measure the extent to which policing, displacement, and changes to public space impact people’s ability to stay cool, safe, and connected to community. This and other community-led efforts to document how extreme heat compounds ongoing manifestations of state violence – in this case, exacerbated by FIFA’s presence in Vancouver – are crucial.

The law is ill-suited to address climatic harms

In Part 2 of our FIFA on the Block Series, we highlighted the inadequacy of legal avenues for people who experience human rights impacts during FIFA to report those violations and receive timely redress. When extreme heat is added to the equation, the law is especially ill-equipped to provide real remedy. Though the Canadian Environmental Protection Act symbolically recognizes that every person in Canada has the right to a healthy environment, this right is not currently actionable: meaning there is no mechanism for people whose right to a healthy environment is violated to seek a legal remedy. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for its part, is silent on climatic rights – though efforts to recognize the right to a healthy climate under section 7 (which protects the right to life, liberty, and security of the person), and section 15 (which enshrines legal equality) are gaining traction.

But for now, the law has little to offer people who experience harms that are either caused or compounded by extreme heat. A person who experiences discrimination from a bylaw officer, for example, may be able to file a complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) and receive a remedy that recognizes the harm they suffered from being displaced and/or having their belongings confiscated. But the law cannot currently account for the ways in which extreme heat exacerbated the harm they experienced: for instance, by being forced to be mobile in high humidity or increasing their exposure to the sun by taking away the equipment they use for shading.

The law must evolve in unique, creative ways to account for the ways that climate change’s impacts undermine fundamental human rights. But by the time it does so, the 2026 World Cup will be long gone.

FIFA will only drive us further into climate crisis

The irony underlying all of this, of course, is that while climate change is disrupting the 2026 World Cup and exacerbating FIFA’s impacts on host city residents, FIFA is, in turn, driving us further and further into climatic crisis.

Indeed, the 2026 World Cup is set to have the “highest climate impact of any sporting event in history.” All told, the tournament is expected to emit 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide: equivalent to the emissions of 6.5 million cars being driven for an entire year. Air travel not only from fans, but also the teams themselves – who must each travel across three countries over the course of the tournament – accounts for 85% of the World Cup’s emissions. Moreover, the 2026 World Cup is being bankrolled by a laundry list of corporate sponsors with appalling carbon report cards. Most notably, FIFA has a multi-year sponsorship from Aramco, the state-owned Saudia Arabian energy company and the single largest carbon emitter on the planet.

But more broadly, FIFA is emblematic of the same capitalist and colonial logics that have driven and continue to drive the climate crisis. FIFA and its 2026 World Cup operations are rooted in the prioritization of profit, spectacle, and consumption over and above community, care, and the stewardship of the land. Together, capitalist and colonial logics treat certain people, just like certain environmental resources, as disposable. The harms that fall both on people and on (stolen, unceded) land are just part of the cost of doing business. These are the ways of thinking and being that got us into this moment of crisis, and that are driving climate catastrophes both at home and abroad. They are also the root of political decisions to invest in mega-event related policing and public spectacle over housing, healthcare, and meaningful community supports. Surely, it is time for a different approach.