Sustainability Huddle

There’s an old saying that many people in sport are familiar with: that athletes die twice instead of once – the first time, when their professional sports career is over. But although leaving their teammates, fans and coaches can be the most overwhelming and scary point of their lives, Danielle Berman is sure that transitioning sportspeople can thrive as they take the first steps into their new l...

Since Nelson Mandela said that sport had the power to change the world, his words have been used countless times to illustrate sport’s potential to do good – to the point that his moving speech 20 years ago has almost become a cliché. But Neill Duffy, the founder of 17 Sport – the world’s first sports impact agency – is adamant that those words are as true today as they were two decades ago – but...

In June this year, the Green Sports Alliance was meant to be celebrating its 10-year anniversary at its annual summit, this time hosted in Minneapolis. But, like so many events occurring in 2020, the gathering was curtailed by the Covid-19 crisis. The world – and the US in particular – is a different place and, in many ways, the remit of the Green Sports Alliance has grown as a result. While its o...

Cast your mind back to 2008 – a year largely remembered for the global economic crisis that caused panic and uncertainty. With the economy in tatters, it probably didn’t seem like the best time to strike out and start a new business. But that’s exactly what Jaime Nack – this week’s guest – did. Not only that, but her fledgling consultancy, Three Squares Inc, specialised in something called ‘sustai...

In 2016, US publication Sports Business Journal reported that only 11% of sports organisations had a formal strategic plan in place. The number with a standalone sustainability strategy is probably even smaller. A significant proportion of companies on the stock market publish non-financial reports every year and, with many of these organisations involved in sport in some way (either suppliers or...

Innovation and ambition are two words that are synonymous with Formula 1. Sustainability not so much – at least until now. But that could all be about to change. Since being acquired by Liberty Global outright in 2017, the popular motoracing format has undergone something of a transformation, at least on the business side. Now, reducing its carbon emissions and becoming a bastion of sustainability...

Athlete health and wellbeing has become a topic of growing importance in sport, particularly in the fields of mental health and safeguarding. However, one of the factors that has the potential to be truly detrimental to athlete health and performance is being overlooked by most. Poor air quality is responsible for the deaths of seven million people per year, according to the World Health Organizat...

When ‘sport’ and ‘science’ are juxtaposed together in the same sentence, there’s almost an assumption that we’re talking about medicine, fitness or physiotherapy. But when Extreme E (the off-road electric car racing series and sister of Formula E) revealed its Scientific Committee to investigate the impact climate change was having on the race locations, the intersection of science and sport took...

“There is not one problem that does exist or will exist that cannot be solved by a motivated generation of young people.” That’s probably the stand-out quote from this week’s guest, Jesse Lovejoy, who as the director of the San Francisco 49ers EDU programme designs and oversees a large-scale STEAM (science, technology, education, art and maths) education programme that engages thousands of childre...

Despite the focus of the world being firmly fixed on the continuing coronavirus pandemic and social and racial divisions in the US, World Water Day last week was a good opportunity to acknowledge other major issues facing the planet, in this case the many crises being experienced by our largest bodies of water. After spending more than two decades as a competitive sailor, Damian Foxall is all-too-...

Embedding sustainability into organisational culture is made possible by empowering the individual. According to Terry Cecil, the same is true of creating sponsorships that are ethical and sustainable in every sense of the word. In this week’s episode, the president and chief executive of the International Sponsor Council makes his case for a sustainability professional being at the heart of each...

If you’d have mentioned purposeful/cause/sustainable sponsorship in the sports industry 20 years ago, chances are you would have drawn a number of blank looks. But this week’s guest, Kevin Bartram, did just that when, venturing out on his own in the late-90s, he decided that sport sponsorship should be about more than just money and exposure. There was a real chance, he saw, for brands and sports...

Greenwashing. Pinkwashing. Wokewashing. Nobody wants their brand to be accused of anything to do with -washing. But it’s not just about what an organisation does itself – it’s also about the activities of the companies and individuals that organisation is associated with.  Money, of course, is what primarily drives sponsorship, but increasingly sponsored properties (such as sports teams, leagues a...

When marketing executives of major brands start putting together sponsorship campaigns and activations, they should take a leaf out of Benjamin Franklin’s book and ask: “What good shall I do this day?” That’s according to John Balkam, the author of 3-Win Sponsorship, a book that plots the history of modern sports marketing to its present era, which revolves around purpose and values. According to...

In 2003, when the Cardiff Half Marathon was first established (alongside a marathon event), 1,200 people turned up to the starting line aiming for a shot at glory. Fast-forward to 2019, and that number has mushroomed to around 20,000. From half marathons and marathons to Iron Man contests, the popularity of mass participation events has surged over the past few years although, in the current envir...

“Keep the tree-hugging hippies out of the stadium!" “Let God handle the environment.” “I appreciate the (team’s) environmental initiatives, but I think (if you go) too far on environmental issues, things start to get political.” These are just some of the responses provided by highly-identified fans of a well-known US sports franchise when asked about their view of the team’s environmental in...

What do baseball and cross-country skiing have in common? Nothing really, apart from the fact that both sports are facing significant challenges – even existential threat – because of extreme weather brought on by climate change. Research undertaken by Sport Ecology Group co-director Madeleine Orr paints an uncomfortable picture for both sports. But the fact is that baseball and skiing are not alo...

Because of sport's intrinsic relationship to the natural world, many of us assume that fans of sport will care more about the environment and be more aware of the dangers it faces. But a piece of research conducted by Seattle University professors, Brian McCullough and Galen Trail, has found that differences between sports fans’ and non sports fans’ approach to the environment is “non existen...

Two years ago, The Sustainability Report featured an interview with this week’s guest in which she described her first sustainability gig – voluntarily greening the Women’s Field Hockey World Cup in England. Since then, Joie Leigh’s career in sustainability has gone from strength to strength. She has successfully transitioned from elite sport to life as a sustainability professional with strategic...

Last year, 19 current and former elite athletes wrote an open letter to The Guardian newspaper calling on other sportspeople to follow the example set by Greta Thunberg and use their platform to demand strong climate action from governments and industry. Katie Rood, fresh from signing for Lewes Community Football Club (the only club in the world to allocate the same resources to male and female fo...

Most surfers will tell you that their pastime is far more than a sport. It’s a way of life. A way of being. Surfing’s intimate relationship with the ocean and environment is clear. So it’s no surprise that its premier competition, the World Surf League, is winning plaudits for its impactful and innovative sustainability initiatives. Through its nonprofit arm, WSL Pure (which has its own podcast ),...

It’s fitting that in Paris, the home of the landmark 2015 Climate Agreement, sports contribution to addressing the evolving climate crisis was one of the standout discussions during the inaugural Global Sports Week . More than that, it was a chance to discover how major sporting institutions like the International Olympic Committee and a major events like the Paris 2024 Olympic Games could work wi...

In the first episode of the second series, The Sustainability Report talks to Scott Jenkins – one of the founders of the green sports movement in the US. Throughout his career working on the operational side of sports management, Jenkins has made it his mission to make the stadiums he has been responsible for as sustainable as possible, and leverage that innovation to engage with fans and other im...

This week’s episode of The Sustainability Report Podcast is the last in the current series. And what better way to end this run than by talking to one of the pioneers of the sport and sustainability movement, Dale Vince. Almost a decade ago, Vince was asked to invest in a cash-strapped, poorly-performing football club in the south-west of England. After reluctantly dipping his toe in, Vince decide...

In 2006, Professor Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for establishing the Grameen Bank, which offered capital to people who were too poor to apply for bank loans so that they could start their own businesses and break out of poverty. Thirteen years on, the social entrepreneur and economist is attempting to use sport to stimulate the social business model through the Yunus Sports Hub...