Richard Curtis, Emma Thompson and Deborah Meaden are among celebrities who have called on Wimbledon to end its new partnership with Barclays over the bank’s multibillion-pound support for fossil fuel projects.
As the 2023 championships get under way on Monday, the group claims the sponsorship deal, reportedly worth at least ?20m a year, is damaging the club’s reputation.
In an open letter to Sally Bolton, the chief executive of the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), the campaigners said: “Put simply, Barclays is financing and profiting from climate chaos, and accepting a sponsorship deal from them is an endorsement of these actions.”
Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, retail consultant Mary Portas, Dr Mya-Rose Craig, the British-Bangladeshi ornithologist also known as Birdgirl, and Christiana Figueres, who was head of the UN climate change convention that achieved the Paris agreement adopted in 2015 and effective from 2016, are among those who have signed the letter. Greenpeace UK, the Big Issue Group and Global Witness are also backing the campaign.
The multi-year partnership was announced in November with Barclays replacing HSBC after 15 years. Curtis and the letter’s other signatories argue that the deal is “inconsistent with Wimbledon’s cultural legacy and environmental policies”.
In recent years, the club has announced a range of sustainability measures and set ambitious targets to mitigate the climate crisis. In April, it announced it was piloting a refillable water system on court for the first time.
But critics of the Barclays deal have accused the club of greenwashing. Campaigners said the bank had given more than $38bn (?30bn) to oil and gas companies, including Exxon Mobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, in the last two years. The figures come from the Banking on Climate Chaos report, published in April.
Curtis, who founded Make My Money Matter, which campaigns on banks and oil firms, said: “With the great respect and love for Wimbledon – and all the magic from Billie Jean King to Andy Murray – the decision of the AELTC to partner with Barclays is a very bad line-call.
“Barclays is Europe’s largest fossil fuel funder, providing over $190bn to the industry since the Paris climate agreement in 2016. They are also a set behind their peers like HSBC and Lloyds: they’ve failed to rule out direct financing for new oil and gas, the most important commitment of all now.
“By agreeing a new sponsorship deal with Barclays, Wimbledon is damaging its reputation, failing to meet public expectations and endangering our wonderful green planet, that they’re meant to embody.
“It’s getting very late in the day to tackle the climate crisis – we’re at the semi-finals now – and so it’s time for Wimbledon to knock Barclays out of the competition by dropping them as a sponsor.”
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The campaigners added that a survey of 2,000 UK adults, conducted by Make My Money Matter, showed that 42% of respondents said Wimbledon should drop Barclays as a sponsor, while 13% said they should not.
An AELTC spokesperson said: “Barclays’ commitment to creating access to sport for all is something that we are passionate about and, thanks to their generous support of the Wimbledon Foundation, will be a central theme of our partnership.
“We believe that Wimbledon, along with other major sporting bodies and events, has a meaningful role to play in helping to protect the environment, today and for the future. Our ambition to have a positive impact on the environment is central to our day-to-day operations and is a core part of putting on a successful championships.”
A Barclays spokesperson said: “We have set 2030 targets to reduce the emissions that we finance in five high-emitting sectors in our financing portfolio, including the energy sector, where we have achieved a 32% reduction in our financed emissions since 2020.”
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