Sustainability

Johan Cruijff ArenA and GSES are launching international sustainability standard for events and event venues

Published at 19 June 2023

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 groundbreaking and transparent system ensures honesty and integrity, by publishing the promises of every organisation that takes part. We will be using the GSVB system to make good on our ambition to become net positive by 2030. This ambition means that we will give more to the environment and society as a whole than it takes.

Thanks to solid cooperation with our partners, we have proven since our inception that we are a socially committed, sustainable stadium spurred on by continuous innovation. For instance, we 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 us with green electricity, and we have joined the ‘1,000 jobs for Amsterdam Zuidoost’ initiative, which is helping disadvantaged people into work. This gives us 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 we will only be able to achieve if the entire chain follows suit. Hence we are calling on our partners and suppliers to sign up to the GSES platform. We will communicate progress and any challenges openly and transparently, thus enabling other organisations such as partners with similar sustainability goals to learn from these.

Our platform measures performance in terms of sustainability

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, we will not only measure i 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.