As politics continue to stifle climate action, experts like marine ecologist Carlos Duarte are turning to sports to sound the alarm that climate change requires immediate action. E1, the first fully electric motorboat racing championship, is answering the call by providing sports entertainment in iconic marine environments while driving technological solutions that can help repair ocean health and decarbonize aquatic mobility.

It’s a pivotal moment for E1. In its second season, the electric motorboat racing championship is expanding from 5 race locations to 7, has secured broadcast deals with DAZN and CBS Sports, and has added new team owners like NBA superstar LeBron James.

With two new race locations on two different continents set to be announced after the Doha GP, E1 is pushing to become a globally recognized racing championship all while the waters its athletes race on continue to warm.

Duarte is collaborating with E1 because he feels that sports “push the limits of the possible,” and humans “need that spirit” to restore ocean health.

Sports’ Role

Duarte — who on top of his role as Tarek Ahmed Juffali Research Chair in Red Sea Ecology at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, is the Chief Scientist for E1, Oceans 2050, and Ocean US — spoke to me ahead of the E1 Doha GP to explain his collaboration with the championship. The ecologist said, “I discovered that sports are the biggest unifier in this polarized world.”

Duarte referenced that roughly 75% of humans watch the FIFA World Cup and that sports create joy and mimicry that few other aspects of life provoke. Team owner LeBron James has over 200 million social media followers, and collectively E1 owners — which include Tom Brady, Rafa Nadal, Virat Kohli, Didier Drogba, Will Smith, and Marc Anthony — have over 1 billion followers. This, according to Duarte, means they, and now E1, have the “power to mobilize people in the right direction,” because fans tend to listen when their sports heroes take a stance on an issue.

Sporting icons taking a stance on climate is pivotal in a moment when sports are being commandeered for political and commercial means. E1 is part of the Saudi Private Investment Fund-backed Electric 360 partnership that focuses on advancing electric mobility. PIF has a growing sports portfolio that includes LIV Golf, Formula 1, and the 2034 FIFA World Cup.

PIF is also funded in large part by decades of Saudi oil and gas sales. When confronted about this, E1 Co-founder and CEO Rodi Basso sought to assuage concerns, stating, “Since I came across PIF, I’ve seen them collaborating with us, believing in us, contacting local authorities to help them, and encouraging people to install new electric technologies.”

Sports can also be a fertile testing ground for new technologies. Motorsports have a long history of bringing race technologies to the road. Duarte and Basso would like to do the same with aquatic mobility technologies and infrastructure, which Duarte says are roughly 15 years behind the automotive industry. Simply put, while EVs are common nowadays, electric boats are not.

E1’s Solutions

Rodi Basso founded E1 to help find technical solutions to aquatic mobility and to raise awareness about declining marine ecosystems. He is using E1 to ensure future generations can continue living in coastal areas and enjoying exciting sports events like they currently do. He says, “Honestly, I feel the responsibility to keep providing entertainment in a responsible way.”

E1’s three foundational pillars are innovation, marine lifestyle, and ESG. By expanding the race calendar, E1’s executives hope to address all three: providing exciting and sustainable events in new locations around the world while allowing universities and private companies to study and trial new technologies that can be applied outside the race circuit to other sectors.

For Basso, “ESG is a way to create value, not a self PR strategy.” During season 2, E1 is working alongside space agencies — Basso is an aerospace engineer by trade — to see if the ecosystem changes its scientists see in coastal waters are mirrored by what space agency satellites are picking up.

While its teams compete on the water, E1 is also undergoing ISO 20121 certification, which provides guidelines and best practices for sustainable event management. This is so E1 can host net-zero sporting events. The championship already has PAS 2060, an internationally recognized standard that demonstrates carbon neutrality. However, Basso is adamant that the ultimate goal is zero-emission events, which he is sure the championship will achieve.

According to Basso, E1’s average emissions per race are 335 tons of CO2 equivalent. Per the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, that’s the same as 40 homes’ energy use for one year. The number is relatively high, but still 200 tons lower than Formula 1.

To lower the environmental impact, E1 is implementing more technology to track its carbon footprint and it is looking for ways to reduce the freight it needs to ship from race to race. It is also fully rolling out its Blue Impact Championship, which mimics SailGP’s Impact League. The Blue Championship “challenges teams to drive positive impact by mobilizing society to reverse effects on ocean and aquatic systems.”

In Basso’s words, the Championship is hugely important for E1 because it “moves the focus from being the best in the world to doing the best for the world.” The program focuses on the transfer of knowledge and is fully supported by each of the celebrity team owners. Critically, each action is verified and judged by an expert panel (including Duarte). One sample action is donating money to support aquatic research and restoration programs.

According to Duarte, “The launch of the E1 Blue Impact Championship provides a blueprint and pathway for each of our participating teams to become active partners in our mission, and for them to be acknowledged for their innovations and inventiveness in supporting appropriate initiatives. It’s an exciting challenge for both us and the teams and provides a new and progressive arena in which to compete.”

On the water, E1’s “RaceBird” boats are fully electric and use a foil design which creates spray but not waves. The spray effect helps reduce waves and in turn coastal erosion, a characteristic many coastal cities, like Venice, suffer from.

The use of electric engines is not only more efficient, it reduces noise pollution by close to 80% compared to internal combustion engines. Noise pollution is a mere annoyance for humans, but it can be detrimental to marine life that uses echolocation to communicate. Professor Duarte and his team used last season’s Lake Como GP as a testing ground for E1’s noise pollution. According to him, their results showed that noise pollution from electric boats was 50% lower above water. It was so quiet that the team could still hear the birds in the nearby forest chirping. Underwater, they found that the frequency of sound was much higher, which meant it dissipated quicker in the water and created less animal interference.

For Duarte, part of the allure of working with E1 is helping aquatic mobility catch up with others. He notes that of all the marinas E1 raced in during its first season, Lake Como was the only one with other electric boats or charging stations.

If E1 races can provide the impetus needed to create more electric infrastructure, then it will have provided a net positive aside from entertainment. Duarte draws parallels between the space industry and the sports sector, as they have similar budgets. Space has always been an innovative industry, whereas sports (motorsports aside) have done little to provide new sustainable technologies, something Duarte would like to see change. He says there is “huge scope to improve this and promote new technologies.”

The Urgent Climate Situation

As someone who has traveled to the poles to research melting ice caps, Duarte feels the urgency more than most. He says he is often reminded of the Martin Luther King Jr. quote “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.” King was speaking about civil rights, but Duarte feels King’s idea of “fierce urgency of now” has taken on a new meaning in the face of climate change.

As things stand, Duarte is most concerned about increasing ocean temperatures, the collapse of AMOC, rising sea levels, and changes in ocean chemistry. He notes that the world entered 1.5℃ of post-industrial warming in 2023. Such warmth is destroying entire ecosystems, eroding shorelines, increasing the intensity and density of hurricanes, and reducing the number of calcified organisms (mollusks) that are integral to marine health.

Such devastation has a direct effect on humans. Roughly 40% of the world’s population lives within 100km (60 miles) of the coast. In the US, 129 million people live in coastal communities, and 22% are considered vulnerable populations.

Duarte is not optimistic about the situation, but he is hopeful. He notes that the scientific and semantic distinction between the two is that hope implies that one is aiming for a positive outcome, but recognizes the challenges and hard work required to overcome them.

He joined E1 because he realized that publishing more scientific papers wouldn’t galvanize people to take action. What he loves about E1 is that, unlike much environmental news, it is not about guilt, it’s about doing something fun, and fun motivates people.

Over his 43 years of research, Duarte has learned how humans impact waterways, he has searched for solutions to ocean health issues, and now he is focused on delivering action. He is certain that his third act is his most important and knows that solutions exist.

He notes that oceans became far cleaner due to indirect benefits from the Clean Air Act of 1970, and whale populations recovered after the global ban on whale hunting was imposed. He admits that coral reefs will be the hardest to save, as “we don’t currently have the technology to save corals for generations to come,” but he says “If we can recover a great whale, what is it we cannot do?”

The world’s premier marine ecologist is convinced sports have a big part to play, noting, “Investing in healthy oceans is a good business proposition and so is E1, it’s an open market.”