Why Is Sport Such An Important Voice In Sustainability?

What is your first memory of sport? The heartbeat of running your first race? Or the enthusiasm of winning your first game of football? Sport, in whichever form, affects everyone in some way or another. This is the same for sustainability. Not many would link sustainability and sport together, but surprisingly they can have a huge impact on one another.

Are Sports Sustainable? A Black and White Portrait

Currently, many sporting events are seriously lagging behind when it comes to changing their ESG habits.

Stadiums are still awash with plastic cups, sportspeople and fans travel all over the world for games and tournaments, kits and equipment are still made from unsustainable materials.

And while reusable cups and recycled materials for kits go some way to helping, it’s easy to forget the full impact that large sporting events have on local communities, biodiversity in the area and not to mention how big their carbon footprint is.

However, some sports organisations are beginning to address sustainability.

In sailing, SailGP has been designed to leave a positive legacy and make sport more sustainable: they put on a lot of projects at each sailing race city to leave a positive impact everywhere they go. For instance, their latest impact report states that they achieved a 56% reduction in temporary power-related emissions and a 29% reduction across Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions per average event.

In football, ‘Forever Green’ is a sustainability platform for companies and institutions that want to use the most popular sport in the world to save the planet sponsored by Real Betis Sevilla.

It looks like sports have a long way to go. But leveraging the incredible platform that sports and its fans have could create a conscience about environmental problems and drive change. Guess how?

How Can Sports Can Make Sustainability Happen

Have you ever felt the sound of fans in a football stadium?

Imagine if during the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, every person of the 2.45 million spectators who attended a football match was invited to do just one gesture to save the environment. Imagine that the gesture was then performed by the hundreds of millions of people who watched on TV. Multiply this by the number of sports events happening each day in the world and it’s clear to see how impactful sports can really be in sustainability.