Sustainability Huddle

Bushfires, extreme heat, drought. Australia, over the past few years, really has felt the wrath of climate change. Indeed, sport has often highlighted the nation’s plight to the rest of the world, with high-profile incidents occurring during the Australian Open with regards to players being badly affected by the soaring temperatures and smoke from the bushfires. But it’s Australia’s thriving recre...

Data is absolutely everywhere in sport. The trick is knowing what data is meaningful, how to interpret it, and then putting it into action. Sustainability-related data may not be at the top of the priority list for most sports properties. But a look under the hood may demonstrate that those who continue to think that way could be missing a trick – and leaving a lot of money on the table. In this e...

The reach of the English Premier League is mind-boggling. According to its 2019/20 annual review, 880 million homes in 180 countries have access to live matches. Quite simply, the Premier League is one of the most exciting and high-quality sports leagues in the world, featuring many of the world’s best players and coaches duelling it out on a weekly basis. The cultural impact of the clubs and play...

Petrol. Noise. Masculinity. If you had to think of a few words to describe motorsport, the above three would probably be close to mind. But, in recent time, competitions such as Formula E and now Extreme E have sought to change that. Climate action and gender equality are now the watchwords. Even F1 has launched its own carbon neutrality roadmap. A handful of teams within those competitions are at...

Finding solutions. That was the name of the game for 2020, and is likely to be our default mode for a reasonable proportion of 2021 as well. With best-laid plans out of the window, we searched for alternatives – and in many cases, we found better ways of doing things. Of course, once the worst of the pandemic is over major sporting events will, by and large, revert to their traditional form. Peopl...

There are many people in several industries who will feel 2020 was a somewhat wasted year. When it comes to professional development, some may have identified the previous 12 months as a good opportunity to study or complete a course. However, a significant proportion of the population will be feeling pessimistic about the consequence of the pandemic on their job security and industry in general....

It used to be conventional wisdom that when building a career being a specialist in one area was the key to making it to the top. That notion is being challenged, with a broad selection of skills and experiences now highly desirable for prospective employees and entrepreneurs. Our guest for this podcast, Mathieu Muller, demonstrates this perfectly by plotting his education and career that has allo...

Handball is one of the most popular team sports in the world, particularly in Central Europe where it is played and watched with a tribal passion. That’s not quite the case in the US, but Melissa Zhang, the communications manager for USA Team Handball, is plotting the sport’s stateside explosion with its first Olympic medal at the LA 2028 Games the goal. Zhang is also the third of four Global Spor...

Bringing together sport, education and culture. That definition of Olympism, Paulina Fritz says, needs to be highlighted extensively for the true power of sport to shine through. Fritz is the second Global Sports Week Young Sports Maker of four to join us on the podcast, and this notion of exploring culture and learning about sustainable development is a key theme throughout the conversation. Beco...

Over the next few weeks, the podcast will shine a spotlight on some of the emerging bright young sports executives and entrepreneurs who will represent their generation as Young Sports Makers at Global Sports Week next year. Kimberly Fernandez, the social entrepreneur from Mumbai, India, is our first guest in this mini-series.  Fernandez has been immersed in sport since childhood, and when the tim...

There is a section of German football fans that dislike Bundesliga team TSG Hoffenheim by virtue of the fact that it’s owned by billionaire SAP founder Dietmar Hopp. In a nation where fan ownership is a big part of football culture, some supporters believe it signals growing commercialisation of the sport. However, when it comes to sustainability and governance, TSG Hoffenheim is among the paceset...

Earlier this month, World Sailing won the first sustainability award established by GAISF (the Global Association of International Sports Federations) for its comprehensive Agenda 2030 Sustainability Strategy. In this week's podcast, Dan Reading, World Sailing’s head of sustainability and the man behind the strategy, charts the federation’s progress and explains how the plan was developed as...

Despite being one of the smallest international federations – representing a sport very much in its growth phase – the International Sambo Federation (FIAS) has been a sustainability pioneer in sport since 2014. It’s testament to the organisation’s leadership that, despite its limitated resources, social and environmental responsibility is very much a priority. In this week’s edition of the podcas...

Covid-19 < Climate change < Biodiversity collapse. The cartoon, in which each of the global problems is represented by a tidal wave, each one larger in size and looming over the Earth, will be quite widely-recognised by now.  According to the United Nations, the “ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever”, posing a significant threat to human...

In 2018, the Philadelphia Eagles NFL franchise became the first regular season sports team to adopt the ISO 20121 sustainable event standard, which was developed for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. On this week’s podcast, we sit down with the person who encouraged the 2018 Super Bowl-winning team to take its sustainability credentials to the next level – Lindsay Arell of Honeycomb St...

Bringing fans back into stadiums and sports venues safely. That is the primary concern for most sports organisations and facility operators. But there’s a real concern that many may start to equate single-use products with human health as a result of Covid-19, ripping apart a lot of the good work done pre-pandemic around the phasing out of single-use plastic products like beverage cups. This week’...

Snowsports, of course, are feeling the impact of climate change more keenly than other sports. Some studies have shown that the Alps could lose up to 70% of their yearly snow cover by 2100 – placing huge question marks against the futures of a number of sports. Biathlon is one of those sports. Indeed Europe’s Alpine region is the global epicentre of the sport. But, instead of turning a blind eye a...

This week we celebrate our 40th podcast with a very special episode, providing expertise and insight from three of sport’s most knowledgeable and respected sustainability champions. Instead of the usual interview format, this episode features the recording from a panel at this month’s Sport Positive Summit in which Julie Duffus (Olympic Movement sustainability senior manager for the IOC), Omar Mit...

Hosting a large conference is a challenge at the best of times. Logistics, marketing, speaker liaison – the list of tasks needed to be fulfilled for an event to run smoothly – let alone be successful – can appear to be overwhelming. Throw a global pandemic into the mix, and the challenge becomes a mountain to climb. That’s why the sport and sustainability movement – and sports industry in general...

There’s only a handful of people to have ever lived who can claim to have competed at both a Summer and Winter Olympic Games. Oluseyi Smith is one of them. But even though he excelled as an athlete across multiple disciplines, his retirement from professional sport has brought him to what he believes is his true calling: engineering. Or, more specifically, engineering with a sharp focus on sustain...

Science. Technology. Ethics. Art and design. Culture. Media. Olympic sport. Just some of the topics that this week’s podcast guest, Professor Andy Miah, counts within his sphere of expertise and interests.  Specifically for this episode, we’ll be focusing on innovation in the sports industry – primarily sustainable innovation – and what news tech and ways of thinking are best placed to help the se...

Next year, Afridun Amu hopes to represent Afghanistan in the Tokyo Olympic Games’ surfing competition.  Amu is already the first person to compete for the landlocked, war-torn nation internationally in the sport and, in doing so, has overcome a unique set of challenges. It’s no surprise, then, that Amu is also a thought leader and coach in design thinking – a concept that enables individuals and o...

Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on several elements of public life, the job market included, with so many people being made redundant and businesses closing down. So it’s a nice change of pace to hear a story about someone who has recently started a new venture that is thriving. Particularly when that new venture brings together sustainability and sport. Vanessa Nord has done exactly that, a...

Legacy.  Whenever the subject of a major sporting tournament – past, present or future – is brought up, the subject of legacy has to be explored. Traditionally, that legacy has tended to focus on economic impact of hosting a tournament and sport participation rates (if they’ve increased as a direct result). And while Jon Dutton, the chief executive of the upcoming Rugby League World Cup, would lov...

The ‘well building’ is the new ‘green building’. Sustainability in the corporate real estate industry has gone up a notch and, rather than just focusing on the environmental sustainability credentials of a building, the way the building impacts the people that occupy it has become a serious consideration. Air quality, daylight, colour-schemes and healthy food options are important factors for work...