Sport and the environment

Understanding and reducing environmental impact

What does the environment matter for sport?

The ability of future generations to engage with sport depends on the action we take now to address the climate challenge. In 2023, the average global temperature was 1.52⁰C hotter than average temperatures before the Industrial Revolution, as the greenhouse gas emissions produced from human activity continue to warm up the planet.

Climate change has significant impacts on sport – and these impacts are already being felt. Outdoor sports can see physical risks, such as flooding damaging venues, weather-related cancellations or postponement of events and matches, and extreme weather adversely affecting athlete participant motivation, capability, health and performance. These impacts will only become more severe. 

By 2050, it is predicted that:

This does not just impact elite or professional sportspeople – it has far wider implications for levels of physical activity across the population and, by extension, for the nation’s physical and mental health. In November 2022 the UK saw very heavy rainfall – and the number of children and young people who said the weather stopped their physical activity rose by 40%. Additionally, as of 2024, extreme weather has had a negative impact on the ability of 3 in 5 adults to be physically active. The heatwave in July 2022 meant that 1 in 7 adults and 1 in 4 children across the UK were unable to exercise.

The impacts of environmental change go further than temperature and extreme weather events. They also include factors like accelerated coastal erosion caused by more frequent storms, which can threaten venues and sporting facilities such as golf courses. Damage caused directly by storms can mean that walking and cycle tracks are made unusable.

Air pollution is another critical issue, particularly for those who run or cycle, as the amount of pollutants that are breathed in is much greater during cardiovascular exercise.

Water pollution can also be damaging to health: 30% of people get sick after wild swimming in the UK, and only 14% of UK’s rivers and lakes are currently categorised as safe to swim in. The Paris 2024 Olympics saw disruption to the triathlon programme caused by the water quality in the Seine.

Waste management is also crucial, and organisations should be mindful of how they are disposing of used equipment – and particularly plastics. The Ocean Race is widely regarded as one of the toughest races going, a six-month event, circumnavigating the world over 60,000km. Boats which take part are equipped with scientific equipment to track the state of the oceans, and they saw a 20% increase in microplastics in the 5 years between 2018 and 2023. Microplastics are tiny particles of plastic resulting from consumer and industrial waste, which accumulate in nature and take thousands of years to decompose, with negative impacts for human and animal health.

What is the sports sector already doing about the environment?

Trying to define a current state of play of environmental provision across UK-based sport is difficult as there is a real breadth of approach and application between and within different sports. Whilst certain sports and organisations have led the way and gone above and beyond, until the 2020s, many sporting bodies have not had formalised, embedded sustainability strategies. This meant that it had been left up to individual organisations to decide their own approach. A cross-sector approach, which is now emerging, will be able to generate change on a wider scale by providing more guidance and encouraging collaboration to accelerate the learning and implementation process.

In May 2024, Sport England released their sustainability strategy and action plan – Every Move. This represents a roadmap to net-zero for the sport and physical activity sector that preserves spaces in a way that ensures equal access to all for the long term. The strategy aims to make the sector a leader in the environmental sustainability space to use the influence of sport to promote wider changes. £45 million has been earmarked for sustainability initiatives and by 2027, a robust sustainability strategy will be part of all funding criteria. The strategy also draws attention to the interconnectivity of climate change, participation and inequalities and understands that climate change will disproportionately affect those who are least able to mitigate its effects and the funding will represent this.

What can my organisation do about the environment?

Faced with the threat of climate change, sports organisations and associations might decide that they need to do something about climate change and other environmental damage.

To begin with, there are three areas which every organisation can consider – without a significant input of time or resource. While these may not be strictly ‘governance’ actions, they are practical considerations which organisations can use as the basis of an initial action plan:

This is just the beginning – and there is much more that a sports organisation may choose to undertake to become more environmentally sustainable. There are several ‘enablers’ or drivers which can help to accelerate environmental action. These include:

Some of these are discussed in greater detail in other sections of the knowledge base.