As a sport ecologist, I’ve spent the last decade watching carefully as sport organisations around the world have started acting on climate change. At times, it’s been painfully slow moving. At others, it has felt totally hopeless. But as Paris kicks off this week, I feel surprisingly optimistic, and I think it’s time to give credit where credit is due. 

Three years ago, Matt Campelli, editor of The Sustainability Report, and I spent several hours on Zoom as we poured over summer sport federations’ websites for evidence of their sustainability efforts. We wrote about some of what we found but it wasn’t any kind of comprehensive report because there simply wasn’t enough to say about the majority of federations. We told ourselves we’d revisit in 2024. And well, here we are. 

Four months ago, we convened a team of researchers from The Sport Ecology Group to pull data on the sustainability efforts of every sport federation that will have competitions in Paris 2024 or Los Angeles 2028. We included press releases, strategic documents, website pages and email exchanges with representatives from the federations in the data collection and analysis. To my surprise, almost all the federations had something to show for their sustainability work over this last Olympic cycle. 

Roughly half now have a specific environmental sustainability strategy, and more than a quarter have a full-time person managing the sustainability portfolio (another quarter have a committee managing the work). When the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced the Sports for Nature framework in December 2022, they had 11 summer sport federations get on board within the first year. 

Standing out

A few federations stood out for their efforts. We celebrate them with feature stories and crown them for ‘outstanding leadership’, ‘best project’ and ‘most improved’. Candidly, those titles could have gone a few different ways. There were strong contenders for each, but ultimately our team felt strongly about these winners.

While reviewing the data and discussing the feature stories, our team had two hotly contested debates. The first was about fossil fuel funding and sponsorship: should having ties to fossil fuels disqualify a federation from being celebrated? And if so, does it have to be the federation with the direct tie? Or is it enough for a flagship event to be sponsored by fossil fuels? 

I can’t even begin to tell you how many emails flew back and forth about this. There were dozens over the course of a weekend in June. We even had a 60-minute meeting about it, which ran over by 30. And we landed on this: the Sport Ecology Group does not feel comfortable celebrating federations as leaders in the sport sustainability space if they receive funding from fossil fuel interests. 

As for event sponsorship by fossil fuel companies, we decided that even if the federation is not receiving the funding directly, they hold some responsibility for it. Why? If the federation has sustainability strategies that cover its events and publishes guidelines for hosting, then the federation has accepted the premise that its events are a big part of both its carbon footprint and its platform for influence. Therefore, we consider flagship events (like World Cups or World Championships) as part of the federation’s body of work.

“Lesser of two evils”

The second debate focused on greenwashing. This one was tricky because there are many definitions for what can be considered greenwashing. Of course, there’s the easy and most nefarious definition: the practice of lying to consumers about a product or organisation’s sustainability work. 

But there’s also the more nuanced greenwashing that happens when organisations claim a “lesser of two evils” argument to suggest that their product or service is sustainable compared to another unsustainable option (e.g. a single-use water bottle made from 30% less plastic is still a single-use water bottle, it’s not suddenly sustainable because there’s slightly less of it), or when terminology like “carbon neutrality” is thrown around out of turn, or when there’s a lack of proof to substantiate claims. 

We found quite a lot of greenwashing in the sport federations’ work. So much so that we had to start drawing distinctions around what we would call out and what we would not. Ultimately, we chose to report only on accusations of greenwashing by third parties, particularly those which attracted significant media criticism or legal complaints. 

In the end, the report we’ve produced feels like an opportunity to celebrate progress. It’s not perfect (the report, or the sustainability efforts documented in its pages). But as with everything, we can’t let perfect become the enemy of the good. And these three years have been good for sustainability. 

So, for all those involved, congratulations and thank you. I hope you all find time to rest and recharge for a few weeks as this Olympic cycle ends, and return recommitted to doing it all again and better in the next cycle. 

Dr. Madeleine Orr is the co-founder of the Sport Ecology Group, author of ‘Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport’ and assistant professor at the University of Toronto