Mobility Resort Motegi: Satoyama Harmony Project

This project is a 25 year long satoyama management effort that restores and maintains biodiversity of Mobility Resort Motegi where international motor racing events are held. As of 2025, 5,800 species are found at the site and as a result of appropriate maintenance and monitoring our forest has become an important habitat where animals can forage, propagate and winter.

Using influential power as a sport event venue, we promote value of nature conservation to the general public through messages from riders of international racing events, messages to visitors, workshops in collaboration with schools, companies, and communities. Being recognized by OECM, our project has received international acclaim and is considered as a practicable model led by a company for achieving nature-positive.

Under our Long-Term Forest Plan for the period ending in 2030, we will further improve biodiversity and promote sustainable conservation model.

Sport Forever is a national advocacy and engagement campaign led by Cricket for Climate to future-proof community sport. By reframing climate resilience as an opportunity to strengthen local sporting clubs, the campaign united athletes, community leaders, sporting organisations, government and the public behind a practical vision for the future of grassroots sport..

Grounded in proven community club projects and real-world success stories, Sport Forever combined policy advocacy, public engagement, national media and cross-code collaboration to champion dedicated investment in energy efficiency and climate resilience. The campaign helped catalyse the Australian Government’s $50 million Game On program, which will support up to 500 community sporting clubs to reduce energy costs, strengthen facilities and reinvest savings into their communities.

Today, Sport Forever has evolved from a campaign into the national support program helping clubs maximise the impact of Game On funding through project delivery, outcome measurement and storytelling. By progressing from identifying a problem, to influencing policy, to helping implement the solution and realise the impact, Sport Forever demonstrates the unique power of sport to drive practical climate action and create lasting benefits for communities.

The Sporting Nature Project, led by Ulster GAA and funded through The National Lottery Community Fund’s Climate Action Fund, is a community-based biodiversity initiative delivered in partnership with RSPB NI and NI Water.

To date, 32 clubs have participated, delivering practical environmental actions including wildflower meadow creation, native tree planting, habitat enhancement and improved land management practices.

The project has engaged volunteers, players, coaches, schools and local communities through workshops, training, biodiversity audits and hands-on conservation activities. This has increased environmental awareness, developed new skills, and created a growing network of local environmental champions within clubs.

Internally, the initiative has strengthened Ulster GAA’s capacity to embed sustainability within community development work. Externally, it has supported wider community engagement and inspired further environmental action through shared learning, case studies and communication across the GAA network.

The Sporting Nature Project stands out for combining grassroots sport with environmental expertise to deliver measurable biodiversity and community impact. It has transformed how clubs view and use their grounds, positioning them as active contributors to nature recovery and climate resilience across Ulster.

Learn more: www.ulster.gaa.ie/club/clubdevelopment/sportingnature/

Richard Holmes has spent nearly 20 years in sport, with the last 6-7 years establishing himself as one of the UK’s leading voices at the intersection of sport and sustainability. His philosophy is simple but powerful, lead with sport, meet people where they are, and bring sustainability in through co-benefits like health, wellbeing, nutrition and community.

Richard runs Final Third, has co-leads Green Football, created and delivered the double award-winning Cobblers Tackle Food Waste campaign, led sports engagement for Climate Coalition’s Great Big Green Week, co-delivered Save Our Grassroots with Rewriting Earth and runs behaviour change programmes including High Steaks with Hubbub, whilst delivering workshops, consultancy projects and creating toolkits for partners across the sector.

He is a natural collaborator, building partnerships across sectors and consistently using his position to build capability in others, through workshops, toolkits and consultancy relationships designed to spark wider transformation long after a project ends.

Richard’s approach is underpinned by academic rigour, his MBA with Distinction included an award-winning capstone project exploring how football clubs can deliver sustainable fan engagement. He also serves as a Trustee at Birmingham & Black Country Wildlife Trust, giving his time and expertise to a charity focused on nature’s restoration.

Yachting New Zealand’s RŪNĀ programme is a pioneering education and training initiative that reimagines sport as a platform for meaningful learning and environmental action. Designed for students aged 8–15, RŪNĀ combines classroom teaching with hands-on sailing experiences and real-world environmental investigations, creating a powerful and engaging pathway from awareness to action.

Developed in partnership with leading research organisations, the programme delivers credible, locally relevant science through an experiential model that connects young people directly to the marine environment. For many participants, sailing is a first-time experience – building confidence, practical water skills, and a lasting personal connection to the ocean.

RŪNĀ has achieved significant national impact, reaching over 25,534 students, 830 teachers across 21 sailing clubs, now in two countries. Flexible, curriculum-aligned resources ensure accessibility, while digital platforms extend learning into homes and communities.

The programme empowers students to take action through citizen science, restoration initiatives, and national challenges, fostering leadership and responsibility. Communities are discovering a deeper sense of interconnectedness and collective responsibility for the environment.

RŪNĀ has achieved significant national impact, reaching over 25,534 students, 830 teachers across 21 sailing clubs, now in two countries. Flexible, curriculum-aligned resources ensure accessibility, while digital platforms extend learning into homes and communities.

The “Sustainable [Major] Sporting Events” web portal is a freely accessible, scientifically sound and practice-oriented platform for the sustainable planning and delivery of sporting events of all sizes.

Developed by the German Sport University Cologne, the German Olympic Sports Federation and the Oeko-Institut through a two-year participatory research and development process involving over 275 participants from the worlds of sport, academia, politics and practice, the portal bridges the gap between sustainability knowledge and practical implementation. Based on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, it translates complex sustainability requirements into concrete courses of action for sport organisers of all sizes.

At the heart of the web portal are 5 transformation areas, 17 action areas and 6 control areas, which structure sustainability for sporting events and provide practical guidance. Building on this, the portal offers over 600 measures, 268 targets and indicators, quality-assured examples of good practice, interviews with experienced organisers, guidelines and digital tools such as a planning tool, a self-check and an impact calculator. Registered organisers can exchange ideas in the “Network and resources” section.

Since its launch in January 2025, the platform has recorded over 2.3 million page views and supports around 400 registered event organisers.

Sharing knowledge. Securing support.

Ben Hardy-Jones is an inspirational young sports executive from the UK, spearheading The Desert Vipers’ sustainability efforts. Having graduated from Oxford University with a Distinction and course prize in Environmental Change and Management, at the Desert Vipers Ben uses cricket as a platform to promote positive societal change. His master’s thesis, researching how SME restaurants can reduce emissions to net zero, has been developed into two published academic papers on SME decarbonisation, governance and influence.

Since taking on the Business Sustainability Lead role at Desert Vipers, Ben has expanded his remit across reporting, commercial partnerships, people management and sector-wide influence. This past season, Desert Vipers became champions of the DP World ILT20 Season 4 — success that has significantly amplified the reach of Ben’s work.

LFC and Husqvarna have created a pioneering purpose-led partnership that demonstrates how technology can accelerate environmental progress in sport. Built on a relationship that began in 2021 and formalised through a multi-year partnership in 2024, the collaboration combines LFC’s sustainability strategy, TRW, with Husqvarna’s market-leading robotic mowing and battery-powered technology.

Together, the partners have transformed grounds management across LFC’s estate. During the 2024/25 season, 100% of non-playing grass surfaces became robot-maintained, enabling grounds teams to dedicate more time to biodiversity enhancement and ecological restoration. The partnership has contributed to the creation of over 1,000m² of native meadow habitat, the establishment of more than 10,000 plants, expansion of bee populations to approximately 240,000 bees and the monitoring of 65 biodiversity species across club sites.

More than an operational improvement, the partnership demonstrates how environmental innovation can support both elite sporting performance and nature recovery. By reducing reliance on traditional maintenance practices and supporting cleaner operations, they have created a scalable model for sustainable venue management.

The partnership’s impact is transparently reported through TRW and shared across the global sports industry, ensuring lessons learned can inspire wider change and together proving that world-class sport can be a powerful force for environmental action.

The AFL partnered with SisterWorks to transform end-of-life football textiles into new opportunities for both people and the planet.

The partnership addresses the textile waste challenge by repurposing unwanted AFL uniforms, apparel, event banners and promotional fabrics into high-quality, functional products through local social enterprise manufacturing. In doing so, it simultaneously diverts valuable textiles from landfill while creating meaningful employment opportunities for women from refugee, migrant and asylum seeker backgrounds.

Rather than being a one-off upcycling project, the initiative aims to be a scalable circular textile model for the sporting industry. The AFL is investing in product development, prototyping and storytelling to enable AFL clubs to adopt the model, helping embed circularity across football while lowering barriers to participation.

Every product tells a story: connecting fans with the game while demonstrating that sustainability can deliver environmental, social and economic value at the same time.

By combining the AFL’s scale and influence with SisterWorks’ expertise in ethical manufacturing and women’s economic empowerment, the partnership demonstrates how sport can use its purchasing power, materials, and platform to address textile waste, strengthen communities, and inspire broader adoption of circular economy principles across the sporting sector.

This research paper is the first to ask: How is climate change affecting young athletes? Through a powerful case study from a region of Aotearoa New Zealand that has produced many world and national champion athletes and been repeatedly devastated by extreme weather events, this article centres young athletes’ voices about the impacts of climate change on their sporting experiences. Through focus groups and photographic montages with 45 young athletes (54% Maori and 50% female) from a range of sports it reveals how climate change related weather events are significantly affecting young athletes.

Introducing the concept of “polluted sport”, the paper reveals how new health risks, fear, anger, frustration and eco-grief were surfaced through young athletes’ immersion in sporting environments damaged and destroyed by a changing climate. For some, such embodied experiences prompted new modes of environmental care and action.

Ultimately, this paper highlights the importance of listening to, and learning from, young people immersed in sporting environments already being impacted by climate change. A creative and cross-disciplinary collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, this powerful place-based study also reveals the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing polluted sporting environments as intimately connected to health, well-being, healing and performance.

Golf doesn’t sit alongside nature, it sits within it.

Across Ireland, clubs are custodians of the land and the beating heart of their communities, stewarding substantial green space, much of it lying outside active play. In March 2024, Golf Ireland launched Drive the Green, a 2024-27 strategy that turned scattered goodwill into systemic national action. Underpinned by a Board-level access Head of Sustainability and a National Sustainability Committee, it works through 3 roles – Lead, Support, Promote – across 4 pillars. Its engine is the free, expert-led Sustainability Leaders Programme: Golf Ireland as a “sustainability caddie”, supporting each club from wherever it starts.

In under 2 years it has grown from a 18-club pilot to 125+ engaged clubs, with ecology, energy and waste audits & action plans, progress toward GEO certification and achieved real financial savings for clubs. What sets it apart is the power of the collective – clubs across Ireland tackling shared challenges together, each stronger for being part of something national, with clear support and direction from their governing body. It taps what clubs already care about: pride in their place, the quality of play, and their people. A blueprint any sport could follow.

Titled Winning the Breaking Ball, Croke Park’s comprehensive Sustainability Report outlines how the stadium is responding to the complex environmental, social, and governance challenges facing the sports and events sector. The report highlights the actions already taken and the measurable progress achieved—including transitioning heavy infrastructure from diesel to Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO), replacing pitch maintenance equipment with electric mowers, and implementing extensive rainwater harvesting and renewable energy projects.

By aligning these capital milestones with rigorous ISO 20121:2024 standards and approved Science-Based Targets (SBTi) to slash absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50.4% by 2032, the publication sets out a clear, verifiable roadmap to build long-term resilience, drive behavioral change across our supply chain, and deliver a lasting positive impact for the wider community.