How Sport Mega-Events Aligns with The Sustainability Goals

Abstract

In recent years, environmental sustainability has become an increasingly important topic when talking about mega events as host cities face growing pressure to address excessive resource consumption, denser pollution, and greater ecological damage. In this paper, our objective was to construct a model to assess the full environmental footprint of large-scale sporting competitions in multiple dimensions. Firstly, we developed a series of specialized models to determine the magnitude of seven key factors for a sport mega-event. Then we are using 2025 Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, USA as a baseline to evaluate the impact of each factor. Next, each of factors then weighted by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the contribution of each environmental factor to the city’s overall sustainability. Due to the subjectivity of AHP, we additionally applied a more objective method, classification models of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm, to verify the weight results. Finally, based on the model results, we provided a set of recommendations to minimize the environmental impact of sport mega-events while optimizing operational efficiency.