Sustainability in sport refers to integrating environmentally and socially responsible practices in the planning, construction, and operation of sport events, venues, and infrastructure. Sustainability in sport is becoming increasingly important in the current context of climate change and environmental degradation. The sport industry is crucial in promoting sustainability, which can significantly impact our society and the planet. This strategic research area aims to develop research projects on sustainability in sport to find ways to reduce the environmental impact of sport while improving their social and economic benefits.
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Sustainability in sport
Strategic projects
Sports for the Planet?
Major sports events such as the Commonwealth Games, the Olympic Games, the Rugby World Cup or the World Athletics Championships have become a central fixture of late modern societies: they are at once occasions for profound urban transformations, expensive economic ventures, global media spectacles, and the object of frequent controversies, for example around human rights and corruption. As resource-intensive and often socially divisive undertakings, major sports events have a heightened responsibility to become sustainable, all the more so in their role as multipliers followed by millions of people around the world. Despite their importance for the sustainability transition, however, there is a lack of conceptual work and systematic, longitudinal research on the sustainability of these events.
Filling this conceptual and empirical gap, this project will develop a conceptual model and indicator framework for analysing sustainability in major sports events. In a major empirical effort, it will then collect data to evaluate the sustainability of a broad range of these events from 1990 to 2022 and to investigate the factors behind differential outcomes. For this purpose, it will employ a mixed methods approach. Building on a pilot project, the quantitative part will involve the creation of a database from official documents and public sources, containing some 60 indicators of 248 editions of 24 major single-sports and multi-sports events. This database will allow a systematic comparative analysis of the sustainability outcomes of major sports events over time. The qualitative part will use semi-structured interviews, media and document analysis to deepen the inquiry for eight in-depth case studies to develop context-sensitive explanations for observed outcomes.
