Rethinking sport event sustainability in the age of climate change

This article examines the growing challenges climate change poses to sport events and argues for a more holistic and integrated approach to sustainable sport event management and sport ecology. It addresses the undercurrent divide by criticizing the dominion of conventional frames of event analysis and their limitations. The authors propose an alternative agenda for enabling event adaptation to climate change and more generally capturing the complex relationship between sport events and the environment. This entails a holistic, systems-based, social-ecological portfolio approach.

The article first presents the climate challenges for sport event management. Then it focuses on the ontological-epistemological foundations of sport ecology and sport event management to reveal some inconvenient truths about their divide and suggests an integrative agenda for connecting the missing links between these poorly linked domains. In doing so, the authors propose a shift from a reductionist to a holistic-relational lens, suggesting that sport events should be understood as complex adaptive systems and managed through coordinated event portfolios that enhance collaboration, resource sharing, environmental leverage, and long-term resilience. This mentality can eventually serve as a foundation for formulating a broader ‘event ecology’ paradigm within the leisure sphere that enhances the adaptability of events.

For practitioners, the authors recommend integrating sustainability and climate adaptation across multiple events, stakeholder networks, and sectors to improve resilience, environmental stewardship, and long-term event sustainability.

CITE: Pelcher, J., Trendafilova, S., & Ziakas, V. (2021). Environmental sustainability at the President’s Cup: An eagle or a double bogie? Case Studies in Sport Management, 10(S1), 36-40. DOI: 10.1123/cssm.2021-0007