by If you want your athletes to make greener choices, there’s a simple way to do it: make it a competition. “Athletes want to win things,” says Fiona Morgan, who helped create one of the world’s most sustainable sports competitions.
SailGP, of which Morgan is chief purpose officer, was launched four years ago to be the F1 of the sailing world – a high-speed, high-speed racing circuit where Olympic legends such as Ben Ainslie and Heather Mills drive the fastest boats in the country. around the world, “flying” across the water on hydro-leaf stalks as they easily overlook the shore. He reinvented the sport by having his sailors compete on and off the water: alongside their race events, sailors compete in an equally valuable Impact Series, which measures the actions they are taking to to mitigate environmental impact and to innovate for a carbon-free future. .
Related: ‘Major step forward’: ECB signs UN climate framework
The results were amazing – three seasons later, the competitive athletes had changed their behavior so much that Morgan had to make the criteria much stricter. If you needed proof that people can change – and that sport can help change them – it’s here.
It’s good news for cricket, especially as Morgan has a vested interest in it, sitting on the board of Manchester Originals. As a champion of sustainability, she is uncompromising about the big changes the sports industry needs to make, and fast, but she is also impressed by what the England and Wales Cricket Board has already achieved.
“People have underestimated what cricket has done,” she says, referring to the Environmental Sustainability Plan for Cricket last week and the work the governing body has been quietly doing to help clubs build resilience in their infrastructure. “They have invested £5m in mitigating climate risk such as flooding, which is quite significant.”
For Morgan, The Hundred presents a huge opportunity for the sport to do things differently. “Cricket is a heritage sport, like golf or the America’s Cup,” she says. “The reason why sustainability could be at the heart of SailGP is because we were starting a competition from scratch.”
Through their takeover of Old Trafford every summer, Manchester Originals are setting more challenging sustainability goals around the stadium than before, bringing a plant-based menu into the media spotlight. In September, the ground announced its first official sustainability pledge including a number of pilot schemes to encourage more travel to the center by public transport and cycling.
Travel and tourism related to sporting events is the biggest problem in terms of the industry’s harmful impact on the climate, says Morgan. “Sport is a traveling circus. That’s who he is. And there is great value in that.”
The result is a huge glut of emissions and planes ferrying athletes, support staff, fans and equipment around the globe and back again. Stage competitions and air travel account for around half of the ECB’s carbon footprint.
In many sports, fixture calendars are thrown together with no thought of the travel emissions they will incur (just look at England’s tour of South Africa in January, which included three one-day internationals). In SailGP, they are carefully planned to prevent unnecessary flying. “Everyone has the details, so they know which option is best. It’s about changing decision-making at a senior level.”
Climate change will require sport to challenge the foundations of some of its most entrenched economic models, says Morgan. “I don’t know how we’re going to tackle this, but when a major event goes to a city the most important key performance indicator for the host is the amount of international tourism it will generate. Everyone is ignoring that right now and the fact that it won’t be available in the same way in the future. We have to ask how sport can push different kinds of values - things that are not meant to be.”
Her message for cricket – for all sports – is to adapt early and adapt now. Even the most unlikely sports can make a big contribution to a more positive climate future: “People think motorsport has a terrible footprint, but some of the stuff it’s doing is incredible. The investment it can make in clean energy and automotive technology will change the entire automotive industry.
“Instead of criticizing the sport, we need to recognize their influence. Educate your athletes. They go through EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] training, so why wouldn’t they go through climate education? They have such a powerful voice.”
The UN has identified sport and fashion as the two consumer sectors with the greatest potential to change global behavior as people continue to engage with them at all ages. Therefore, they are the most influential athletes in the world.
Which brings us back to the idea of the impact series and whether cricket could ever be persuaded to adopt it. Could we see Nat Sciver-Brunt and Harry Brook competing to eat less meat or to lobby world governments on their environmental concerns? Morgan says the most watched sports have shown interest in the concept. “In the next year you will see another sport being done in some way, and it is one of our big ambitions to bring it into schools to encourage young people.”
In the meantime, you can see him – and the teams – in action in Dubai this weekend, at the final SailGP race of the year.
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