Sport, Human Rights & Climate Action: Joining the Dots

Authors - Centre for Sport and Human Rights, Lucy Amis, Shubham Jain

Sport faces serious short and long-term threats due to the effects of the climate crisis. Global temperatures have hit record highs every month for over a year. With extreme weather events, wildfires, floods, droughts, worsening water and air quality, rising sea levels, and other environmental damage showing no signs of letting up, sport is at a crossroads. The sporting calendar is under stress, event and broadcasting schedules are being upended and sponsors’ activations risk taking a hit. 

As with numerous other sectors, sports and sports events contribute to the worsening of the climate crisis. Many actors across the sports ecosystem are responding with important new strategies, partnerships, and initiatives. Yet analysis of the impact of the climate crisis on the effective enjoyment of a range of human rights has been notably absent from discussions on sport and climate. Unless we build a clear understanding and consensus on how the climate crisis affects people in, around, and through sports and its events in all their diversity, the human rights consequences of the climate crisis in relation to sports risk being neglected and potentially escalating. 

The climate crisis is fundamentally a human rights crisis. The UN Human Rights Office and other agencies have established that global warming and environmental degradation threaten the effective enjoyment of human rights including the right to life, health, water and sanitation, food, housing, self-determination, education, culture, work, and development. Athletes, fans, workers, volunteers, and other people in and outside of sport in disadvantaged situations are already experiencing the worst effects of the crisis, due to the intersecting effects of variations in socio-economic factors, ethnicity, race, gender, age, disability, and geography. Action is needed by all sport ecosystem actors to recognise responsibilities, understand risks, co-create solutions, share learnings, and break out of disciplinary or institutional silos that limit our ability to innovate and respect, protect, and fulfil human rights.

The Centre’s Sport, Human Rights, and Climate Action programme seeks to work with the ecosystem actors to understand how best we can support and catalyse change by all committed actors to mitigate sports’ impact on climate, climate’s human impact on sport, and leverage the power of sport to champion climate action and ensure climate justice in, around, and through sport.

In the coming months and years, CSHR hopes to research and consult widely on how to promote human rights and climate action in, around, and through sports. With new partnerships and additional resources, CSHR will seek to:

• Establish a clear evidence base and comprehensively map the human rights at risk. 
• Identify individuals and communities at the greatest risk of human rights harm and map the varying impacts of the climate crisis on people and their access to sports. 
• Pinpoint the duties and responsibilities of different institutional actors in sport. 
• Assess the human rights and climate action laws, regulations, standards, and norms that apply/might apply to institutional sport actors, and ascertain if/how these are resulting in effective compliance and positive impacts for people and the planet.
• Collaborate to co-create guidance on good practices, challenges, and opportunities to strengthen the capacities of people impacted by sport to claim their rights and institutional duty-bearers to meet their responsibilities.
• Co-create programmes and guidance on leveraging the power of sport to champion climate action and ensure climate justice in, around, and through sport.

Acknowledgments & illustration: The data and facts for the infographic have been taken from reporting by the Guardian and New York Times (here, here, here) and studies by the British Association for Sustainable Sport (here, here). The Climate Stripes (a series of vertical coloured bars) represent the progressive heating of our planet in a single, striking image; developed by Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading.