Johan Cruijff ArenA with new sustainability standard

After the Johan Cruijff ArenA in Amsterdam recently announced its intention to become climate-positive by 2030, a new sustainability standard has been published. All processes are to be communicated openly and transparently.

The Johan Cruijff ArenA and GSES (Global Sustainable Enterprise System) are launching a new, international sustainability standard for events and event venues. The Global Sustainable Venue Benchmark (GSVB) is a measurement and verification process that gauges the sustainability of organisations, events and suppliers. This new and transparent system ensures honesty and integrity, by publishing the promises of every organisation that takes part. The ArenA will be using the GSVB system to make good on her ambition to become net positive by 2030. This ambition means that the Johan Cruijff ArenA will give more to the environment and society as a whole than it takes.

​Thanks to solid cooperation with its partners, the ArenA has proven since its inception that it is a socially committed, sustainable stadium spurred on by continuous innovation. For instance, the Johan Cruijff ArenA teamed up with a variety of partners to develop Europe’s largest energy storage system in a commercial building for the purposes of storing sustainably generated electricity. In addition, in excess of 4,200 roof-mounted solar panels combined with the procurement of wind energy are providing the ArenA with green electricity, and it has joined the ‘1,000 jobs for Amsterdam Zuidoost’ initiative, which is helping disadvantaged people into work. This gives the Johan Cruijff ArenA a solid starting point from which to make the next step to net positive.

By creating this sustainability standard, which will provide guidance on enhancing sustainability, the ArenA and GSES are aiming to help other organisations to become more sustainable too. Becoming net positive is something that the ArenA will only be able to achieve if the entire chain follows suit. Hence the ArenA is calling on its partners and suppliers to sign up to the GSES platform. The ArenA will communicate progress and any challenges openly and transparently, thus enabling other organisations such as partners with similar sustainability goals to learn from these.

GSES is a ‘Software as a Service’ platform for the purposes of measuring performance in terms of sustainability. The GSES platform uses the GSES Meta Standard as a universal language to measure sustainability. This overarching standard recognises over 500 (inter)national sustainability standards and certificates that render sustainable performance measurable and comparable. All data featuring on the dashboard has been verified independently by a certification body via Audit Independer.

Measurement is a fundamental requirement in order to ascertain the steps that the ArenA will need to take to become net positive. The stadium will be measuring the added value in terms of Environment, Social and Governance on a variety of topics and presenting this through a dashboard from GSES. On the GSES platform, the ArenA will not only measure its own sustainability performance and SDG progress but the CSRD and the supply chain (including scope 1, 2 and 3) as well.

Organisations can be assessed on the following ‘GSES pillars’: CSR, Circular Economy, CO2, Sustainable Procurement, Health & Safety and Biodiversity. Products can be assessed on the Health Footprint, the Circular Footprint, the Environmental and Social Footprint. All assessments are presented in the form of standardised scorecards on the GSES platform. GSES is collaborating with officially recognised certification bodies such as Control Union and Kiwa for the independent verification of information.(STADIAWORLD, 21.06.2023)