Sometimes, the context you live in helps connect seemingly unrelated pieces of news.

As someone based in Central Europe with a career focused on sustainability in sport, two headlines have stood out for me this week: the devastating floods ravaging my region and the New Weather Institute’s ‘Dirty Money’ report on fossil fuels in the sports industry.

You can see where I’m going with this…

Just last week, I was in Brussels with colleagues from across the sports sector, discussing how to advance the sustainability agenda. We debated whether new toolkits or frameworks could help create a unified approach to tackling climate change through sport.

Some of us emphasised the need to first ensure that everyone involved in sport, from elite to grassroots levels, fully grasps that sustainability and climate issues are not peripheral but fundamental to sport’s business model. 

Using terms like ‘green’ sport can make these issues seem like an optional extra, something easy to ignore. Moreover, the politicisation of the word ‘green,’ highlighted in recent EU elections, shows that some sections of society are pushing back against these efforts.

And then, less than a week later, Storm Boris – supercharged by climate change – ripped through Central and Eastern Europe. Studies reveal that climate change is intensifying rainfall across the continent by as much as 20%, and this storm is a stark example of the escalating crisis we face.

While the media rightly focuses on the tragic loss of life and destruction of crucial infrastructure, sport has also been hit hard. Events in Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic have been cancelled or postponed, leading to sporting and financial losses. 

The grassroots sports scene has been equally affected; in the hardest-hit areas – southwest Poland, northeast Czech Republic and Lower Austria – up to 9,000 sports clubs are struggling with event cancellations and severe damage to their facilities.

This brings me back to the Dirty Money report (brilliantly analysed here in Forbes by Vitas Carosella), which details how sports organisations worldwide continue to accept sponsorship from fossil fuel companies. These are the same companies largely responsible for driving human-made climate change. 

Some might say that instead of paying for sponsorship, these companies should be compensating the sports sector for the damage caused by climate-induced disasters.

There’s a crucial task ahead: convincing decision-makers in sport that short-term financial gains from fossil fuel sponsorship are undermining their core business. The cause and effect are clear.

If we want to safeguard the future of sport and protect it from more frequent and severe climate-related incidents, we need a unified strategy. Climate change and sustainability must be central to policy, not an afterthought.

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