‘Seeing it as a whole’: A research agenda for the sociology of sport and climate change

Abstract

Climate change poses an existential, if varied, threat to sport. Equally, sporting activity is having a substantial impact on the natural environment, an impact to which sporting bodies have been slow to quantify and mitigate. Despite this bidirectional threat, social science research on the relationship between sport and climate change is underdeveloped. Much of the existing research is generated by scholars within sport management and the nascent sub-discipline of sport ecology, both of which tend to focus on organisations’ and managerial responses to climate change. By contrast, climate change and the natural environment have been understudied within the sociology of sport. In this paper, I argue that the limited contribution of sociological perspectives to the debate has restricted the ability to critically examine the social context within which sport and climate change intersect. In response, I advocate for the value of a sociological approach and propose a research agenda for examining climate change within the sociology of sport.

Keywords

climate change sport sociology of sport sport ecology sociology

Few events capture the collective attention of humanity like the Summer Olympic Games. A global broadcast audience of more than three billion people (IOC, 2021) watched 11,000 athletes from 205 countries compete at Tokyo in 2020. The event also generated 6.1 billion user engagements with the International Olympic Committee's social media handles (IOC, 2021). At a moment of human turmoil, the attention of these consumers bore witness to sports’ apparent unparalleled ability to ‘build connection, community and culture through collective moments of achievement’ (United Nations Environmental Programme, 2022: 6). This mass audience also witnessed athletes being ‘tortured’ by ‘brutal’ heat that put their health at risk (Watts, 2021). For example, following two medical timeouts during his men's quarterfinal tennis match, Russia's Daniil Medvedev told the umpire ‘I can finish the match, but I can die. If I die, are you going to be responsible?’ (Watts, 2021).

Sport unites people and places and builds communities. It provides a powerful basis for collective, social, and personal identities, as well as producing notable mental and physical health benefits. Sport is a vehicle for social cohesion and community integration, acting, as UNESCO claims, as ‘a bridge between individuals and nations … an active tool for overcoming stereotypes, rising above exclusion, and fostering citizenship’ (2016). Sport has also inspired social movements and provided a powerful means for political resistance. Equally, it has reinforced authoritarian regimes, stirred up prejudice against outsiders and reproduced conservative social structures. Moreover, aside from these more socio-cultural issues, the global sports industry is also one of the ten most valuable industries in the world (Best and Howard, 2023). Quite simply, sport is an immensely popular human activity; football alone has an estimated five billion fans (FIFA, 2022).

As a global industry, an expression of place-based identity, a community activity, an individual pursuit or leisure activity, sport is facing an existential threat from the global climate crisis (Bas et al., 2022; Bernard et al., 2021; Orr et al., 2022; Schneider and Mucke, 2021). In particular, climate-dependent sports and leisure activities such as cricket, golf and snow sports have developed within a particular environmental context, especially regarding temperature and rainfall, and require the relatively stable reproduction of that environment (Dingle and Stewart, 2018; Hutchins et al., 2023). At a minimum, shifts in the natural environment will change how people produce, consume, and participate in sports. As a result, Breitbarth et al. (2023: 6) claimed that ‘we face the possible extinction of a range of sports as we currently know them’. By 2050, for instance, ten of the previous 19 hosts of the Winter Olympic Games are unlikely to be able to host a similar event (Scott et al., 2015) The IOC itself has expressed concerns about the viability of the games (IOC, 2022). Indeed, the Winter Olympics and snow sports are ‘on the frontlines of climate change’ (Knowles et al., 2024: 438) and increasingly reliant on technological adaptations to function (Mallen and Dingle, 2019; Orr et al., 2022). Likewise, while some professional sports have been able to develop the resources to adapt to the changing climate, community sports have come under threat in some regions due to temperature increases, changes in rainfall and extreme weather events (Bernard et al., 2021; Orr et al., 2022).

Equally, sport has a considerable impact on the natural environment (Wicker, 2019; Wilby et al., 2023), an impact that it has been slow to address (Cury et al., 2023a; Gammelsæter and Loland, 2023). Some sporting entities, most notably the IOC (2017, 2023) and FIFA (2022), have sought to respond to both their own environmental impact and the threat posed by climate change to their activities. Likewise, the United Nations has developed a Sports for Climate Action framework, which requires signatories to commit to ‘halving emissions by 2030 and aiming to achieve net-zero by 2040’ (United Nations, 2018). Conversely, the global sports industry is defined by inaction rather than action (Cury et al., 2023a; Gammelsæter and Loland, 2023) and has often focused on adaptation rather than mitigation or transformational approaches.

Conversely, despite the significance of the changing climate for as popular an activity as sport, the intersection of sport, climate change and the natural environment has been understudied within sociology and the sociology of sport. Instead, while a range of social science research on sport and climate change has emerged that spans communications, economics, marketing, psychology and, as we shall see, sociology, much of the literature has been produced by researchers in sport management and the nascent sub-discipline of sport ecology (McCullough, 2023; McCullough and Murfree, 2020). In providing a focus for research on the bidirectional relationship between sport and the natural environment, as well as examining managerial responses to climate change within sport, there is considerable value in sport ecology. Conversely, sport ecology has retained sport management's focus on sporting organisations and events and is primarily propelled by a post-political and technocratic discourse of risk and adaptation stemming from natural resource management. As a result of this focus on organisations and managerial decision-making, in this paper, I contend that sport ecology has under-theorised the socio-political and socio-economic context in which sport and the natural environment intersect. In response, I argue that a sociological approach to understanding the shifting relationship between sport, climate change and the natural environment would expand understandings of this relationship by facilitating research on the role of institutions and power, stratification and inequality, as well as discourse, media, and social change. In doing so, the paper challenges sociologists of sport to enter into the territory established in sport ecology and sets out an opening proposal for a research agenda driven by sociological insights.

Ultimately, the paper seeks to achieve three things; demonstrate the limited contribution by sociologists of sport to research on sport, climate change and the natural environment; assert the value of a sociological approach; and set out an agenda for research on the intersection of sport and the natural environment within the sociology of sport. The article begins with a review of the literature on sport and climate change within the social sciences. In particular, I outline the parameters of sport ecology and provide a critique of the post-political discourse that animates this field, before turning to scholarship on the climate change and the natural environment within the sociology of sport. I outline the beginnings of a research agenda for a sociology of sport, climate change and the natural environment.

Climate change, sport, and the social sciences

Research on sport and environmental issues in the social sciences has been relatively slow to develop; the earliest publication found in Cury et al.'s (2023a) systematic review of sport and environmental sustainability research was from 1998. Indeed, in Mallen et al.'s (2011) review of 21 sport-related journals from 1997 to 2008, a mere 0.36% of papers (17 out of 4639) focused on environmental sustainability. The limited focus on climate change reflects the initial marginalisation of social science perspectives on climate change, particularly in sociology (Dunlap and Brulle, 2015); research from 2013 showed that at that point only 3% of published research on the global environmental change came from sociologists (International Social Science Council, 2013). The pace of publications on sport and climate change increased significantly from the early 2010s, with 93.25% of the papers found in Cury et al.'s review being published after 2010. This knowledge base is still developing in size and cohesion, with scholars in sport management or sport ecology (Breitbarth et al., 2023; Cury et al., 2023b; Dingle and Stewart, 2018; McCullough and Murfree, 2020; Orr, 2023; Orr and Inoue, 2019), sports science (Abu-Omar and Gelius, 2020) and the philosophy of sport (Edgar, 2020), as well as sociology (Bunds and Casper, 2018) all recently calling for more research.

In the social sciences, the research on sport and climate change can be found in a range of fields, from psychology, marketing, economics, communications, and philosophy, as well as having a limited presence in sociology (Cury et al., 2023a). It is sport management research, however, that has been the most active field. As an academic pursuit, definitions of sport management are contested (Chalip, 2006) and there are competing intellectual threads within what is still a relatively young discipline (Gammelsaeter and Anagnostopoulos, 2022). Nonetheless, as Stokowski et al. (2022) suggested, definitions of sport management tend to coalesce around the business of sport and its administration, including at a recreational level. This focus on business and managerial decision-making reflects the origins of the discipline within business management and physical education departments within colleges in the United States from the 1960s (Stokowski et al., 2022).

Reflecting the discipline's history, diversity and predominant focus, sport management researchers have considered a wide range of issues regarding sport and the natural environment, including environmental sustainability in sport, environmental education through sport, and pro-environmental attitudes among fans and participants (Cury et al., 2023a). Nonetheless, the primary focus is on the management of environmental impacts by sporting organisations, which has generated a proliferation of research (Dingle et al., 2023; Dingle and Mallen, 2021; Dingle and Stewart, 2018; Mallen et al., 2023; Orr et al., 2022; Orr and Inoue, 2019), primarily by researchers associated with the Sport Ecology Group (2024). As Cury et al. (2023a) noted, this research is often focused on North American or Western European sporting organisations, as well as being produced by researchers based at universities in these regions.

The increased focus on the natural environment in sport management literature led McCullough et al. (2020: 516) to propose a new sub-discipline, sport ecology, in order to formalise research that had been building from the ‘mid-twentieth century’. Sport ecology, which has been refined and developed in subsequent publications (McCullough, 2023; McCullough and Kellison, 2020; McCullough and Murfree, 2020), continues the organisational and managerial focus of its parent discipline while building on ‘the rich scientific traditions of human ecology’ (McCullough et al., 2020: 510) to explore ‘…sport, the natural environment, and the bidirectional relationship between the two’ (2020: 509). As such, while seeking to be ‘inclusive of all research focused on the bidirectional relationship between sport and the natural environment’ (McCullough and Kellison, 2020: 202), including sociology, research within sport ecology has tended to focus on individual sporting entities, rather than the cultural, socio-economic and socio-political context in which these organisations exist. Moreover, sport ecology research has consciously conceptualised the relationship between sporting organisations and climate change in terms of risk, vulnerability and adaptation.

Sport ecology's conceptual focus is informed by a discourse of risk, resilience and vulnerability that emerged in the 1980s within the fields of ecology and ‘natural resource and policy research’ (Orr and Inoue, 2019: 455). Indeed, ‘vulnerability’, ‘climate capacity’ and ‘adaptation’ were identified by McCullough et al. (2020: 511) as key concepts in sport ecology in their initial framing of the subdiscipline. These concepts are also at the core of Orr and Inoue's (2019) Climate Vulnerability of Sport Organizations Framework (CVSO), which seeks to mobilise the discourse of vulnerability and adaptation so that researchers can be informed ‘of the risk that climate change presents to sport’ as well as inspiring research ‘on how organisations can minimize their vulnerability’ (2019: 457, emphasis in original). Here, evoking a definition given by the IPCC, climate vulnerability is defined as ‘the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes’ (McCarthy et al., 2001: 6). In turn, Orr and Inoue contended that climate vulnerability needs to be understood in relation to both the potential impact of climate change on a sporting organisation and an organisation's adaptative capacity, which they define as a sports organisation's capacity to accommodate climate impacts with minimal disruptions. The discourse of risk, vulnerability and adaption also animates other research in sport ecology. For example, in Dingle, Dickson and Stewart's work on Australian sport stadia and water resources, they argued that ‘vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation are central concepts to strategic issues of climate change and water for sport stadia organizations’ (2023: 63). Similarly, Dingle and Mallen's comparative study of responses to climate impacts on Australian and Canadian community sports fields identified impacts, vulnerability, resilience and adaptation as the ‘conceptual basis to our study’ (2021: 303).

Conversely, the use of the natural resource management discourse embedded within sport ecology for understanding and responding to climate change has been subject to the ongoing critique in the social sciences (Dunlap and Brulle, 2015). In particular, it has been argued that the framing of climate vulnerability within adaptation discourse is both post-political and technocratic (Eriksen et al., 2015; Johnson et al., 2017; Sherman et al., 2016). The concept of post-politics emerged to conceptualise the so-called post-ideological era that followed the end of the Cold War. Here a range of theorists working in the continental philosophy tradition, most notably Mouffe (2005), Rancière (1999), and Žižek (1999), read post-politics as a form of political engagement that emphasised a consensus around previously contested ideological and political terrain. In this reading, post-politics occurs when contested issues become ‘a matter of administration, where decision-making is not a question of political position but of expert knowledge’ (Maeseele, 2015: 442). More recently, Swyngedouw has argued that environment discourse has become a form of post-politics in which environment policymaking is ‘centred on the technical, managerial and consensual administration’ (2011: 266). As such, in a post-political environment, decision making becomes a matter of technical expertise, otherwise known as technocratic practices. Consequently, as Eriksen et al. contended, while adaptation discourse presents itself as a ‘neutral response to climate change based on technical or managerial decision making in a bounded context’ it is ‘political all the way through’ (2015: 523). Here, in relation to sport ecology, Wilson and Millington (2015: 366) argued that these post-political and technocratic practices lead to ‘a set of seldom questioned and in some ways dubious assumptions’ about sport's relationship with climate change.

Sport ecology's origins in sport management and natural resource management make it inherently interdisciplinary and there is considerable value in sport ecology research for understanding managerial decision-making within sporting organisations. Moreover, its stated goal of uniting research on sport and the natural environment should be embraced. Nonetheless, the limitations of the conceptual framework it shares with natural resource management, along with sport management's focus on organisations and events, means that research within sport ecology can be criticised for under-theorising the socio-political and economic dynamics within which sport intersects with the natural environment.

Indeed, while McCullough and Kellison (2020: 202) argued that sport ecology ‘is inclusive of all research focused on the bidirectional relationship between sport and the natural environment’, which includes sociology, key sociological questions of power, stratification, and social change do not appear to have a significant presence within existing sport ecology research. Although sport ecology is at an early stage of development and research currents are still emerging, this lack of interaction between the sociology of sport and sport management is a longstanding issue; in 1989, Slack and Kikulis argued that a more sociological lens was required in sport management, which had a tendency to focus on ‘practical and applied issues of management’ (1989: 181). In response, the challenge for sociologists of sport is to join and extend the research project defined by sport ecology by mobilising sociological concepts and concerns to enable a critical understanding of the social context in which sport, climate change and the natural environment intersect. Currently, however, climate change and the natural environment have only a marginal presence in the sociology of sport.

Climate change and the sociology of sport

As Wilson and Millington (2015) asserted, there is a small tradition of sociological research on sport and the environment. Early research considered environmental efforts by sporting organisations (Chernushenko, 1994; Kearins and Pavlovich, 2002; Lenskyj, 1998, 2002) and environmental activism (Atkinson, 2009; Mansfield, 2009; Stolle-McAllister, 2004; Wheaton, 2007). There was also a special issue on sport and environmentalism in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues in 2009. Golf (Millington et al., 2018; Millington and Wilson, 2014; Neo, 2010; Stoddart, 1990; Wheeler and Nauright, 2006; Wilson and Millington, 2013, 2014) and the Olympics (Lenskyj, 1998, 2002; McLeod et al., 2018; Millington et al., 2018) have been of particular interest.

Nonetheless, the natural environment continues to be understudied in the sociology of sport. Dart's (2014) content analysis of research articles in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Sociology of Sport Journal, and the Journal of Sport and Social Issues noted that there was ‘limited identification’ of scholarship in the environment. These findings were largely replicated in both Seippel (2018) and Tian and Wise's (2020) analyses of these three sociology of sport journals. While these results mirror the more sport management-focused content analysis of Mallen et al. (2011), compared to sport management and ecology, the marginalisation of environmental issues within the sociology of sport has continued since Dart and Tian and Wise's analyses. Using the search terms ‘climate’, ‘environment’, ‘green’, ‘ecological’ and sustainability (as well as their variants) in any of the title, abstract or keywords of articles in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Sociology of Sport Journal, and the Journal of Sport and Social Issues uncovered only 16 articles across a collective 1235 papers (0.08%) from 2015 to 2023.

As a further illustration of the marginalisation of climate change from the sociology of sport, the fiftieth-anniversary edition of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport features 50 ‘notable scholars’ addressing 50 issues in the sociology of sport (Pike et al., 2015). Not a single contribution focused on climate change or the natural environment. Equally, none of the contributions to the Sociology of Sport's 2018 series, Reflections on Sociology of Sport: Ten Questions, Ten Scholars, Ten Perspectives, considered the natural environment. Research on sport and the natural environment is also largely absent from major handbooks and companions on the sociology of sport. Both the Routledge Handbook of Global Sport (Nauright and Zipp, 2020) and the Research Handbook on Sports and Society (Pike, 2021) make only tangential references to environmental issues, although the final paragraph of the latter book's concluding chapter on the future of sports and society does suggest that ‘emerging topics’ in the sociology of sport ‘will include the environment [and] climate change’ (Coakley, 2021: 391). The notable exception to the marginalisation of the natural environment within sport and sociology is Wilson and Millington's chapter on Sport and Environmentalism (2018) in the Routledge Handbook of the Sociology of Sport (Giulianotti, 2018b).

The absence of sociological engagement with sport and climate change continues in mainstream sociological periodicals. There have been no publications on the relationship between sport and the natural environment in the history of The Sociological Review (1908) or the British Journal of Sociology (1950). Neither has there been publications in The American Sociological Review (1936) nor in the Annual Review of Sociology (1975). There was a recent article on football fans’ attitudes towards climate change (Amann and Doidge, 2023) in Sociology, but otherwise, the topic has had a similarly limited presence in the publication. While sport has a limited presence in these mainstream sociological publications – in constructing this paper, only 52 articles were found to have directly focused on sport across all five of the periodicals – given the threat posed to sport by climate change and the social significance of sport, a single research article on sport and climate change in the history of these publications remains notable.

Furthermore, collected texts that specifically address the relationship between sport and the environment, such as the Routledge Handbook of Sport and the Environment (McCullough and Kellison, 2018) and the Routledge Handbook of Sport and Sustainable Development (McCullough et al., 2022), have had a distinct sport management or sport ecology focus. Both handbooks, for example, are edited by sport ecologists McCullough and Kellison, along with the sport management scholar Melton in the latter text. Moreover, while it is not an exact measure – academic affiliations do not always correspond to disciplinary adherence, especially in the sociology of sport (Wenner, 2017) – only one of the 43 contributors in the former handbook either self-identify as a sociologist in their biography or work in a sociology programme and none of the eighty contributors did so in the latter text. Thus, while sociological concepts and analysis might be embedded within research on the relationship between sport and the environment, this relationship has not been the focus of a sustained sociological analysis. Instead, it is the fields of sport management and sport ecology, as well as the dominant framings within these fields, which have taken up the challenge of understanding the bidirectional relationship between sport and the natural environment.

As such, the marginalisation of the natural environment within the sociology of sport provides a pressing challenge for sociologists of sport, especially given the scale of the threat. It is, to adapt to C. Wright Mills’ iconic phrase from The Sociological Imagination, necessary for sociologists of sport to insist that the organisational ‘troubles of the milieu’ are understood within the ‘public issues of social structure’ (Mills, 1959: 8). In the remainder of the paper, I outline the value of a sociological response to sport and climate change and a potential pathway forward, beginning with what it means to produce a sociological response.

A research agenda for the sociology of sport and climate change

There is no singular sociological perspective, either within the discipline as a whole or within the sociology of sport. Sociology (and its sub-disciplines) is a pluralistic, low-consensus project (Schwemmer and Wieczorek, 2020: 3), that has become characterised by disciplinary self-reflexivity (Frade, 2016: 837) and ‘continuing disputes about its very nature’ (Giddens, 1982: 3). Indeed, one of the features of twenty-first-century sociology is the blurring of boundary distinctions (Jawad et al., 2017). Equally, the sociology of sport is a ‘diverse, complex and contested realm of academic inquiry’ (Giulianotti, 2018a: xx) such that, as McKay states, we should be thinking about a sociologies of sport rather than a singular sociology (2015: 548, emphasis in original).

The pluralistic structure of sociology and the sociology of sport should be acknowledged, along with the inherent liquidity of disciplinary boundaries. Nonetheless, there is value in identifying a core line of inquiry that would animate a distinctively sociological approach to addressing climate change and the natural environment within the sociology of sport, one that would distinguish it from sport ecology through a focus on the cultural, socio-economic and socio-political context in which sporting organisations exist, as well as the political nature of managerial decision making by these organisations. In particular, building on Rosenfeld's (2010: 669) insistence that ‘sociology's core insight’ is that ‘all humanly meaningful activity occurs in social context’ such that, as Frade (2016: 838) stated, sociology ‘…allows us to ‘see it as a whole’ by ‘placing social phenomena within the appropriate social context’, the sociology of sport has untapped potential to critically understand the social context within which climate change is produced and reproduced.

In this regard, as Knoppers (2015: 497) claimed

the use of a critical sociological approach also enables scholars to question assumptions about sport management, to explore practices that produce social inequalities, to pay attention to context and the role of power and to look for possible ways in which current practices of leadership can be transformed.

Thus, the sociological perspectives embedded within the sociology of sport have the capacity to expand upon current research on the bidirectional relationship between sport and climate change by exploring the socio-political and socio-economic context in which this relationship is embedded. In particular, building on existing research threads within both the sociology of sport and the sociology of the environment, sociologists of sport exploring sport and climate change need to take on the challenge of asking questions about the role of institutions and power, capitalism and social stratification, language, media and culture, as well as social change and social justice. In the following, I outline possible lines of enquiry while also offering a number of preliminary starting points for sociologists taking up the challenge of critically examining sport and climate change.

Institutions and power have been a central point of investigation for sociologists, which is evident within sociological responses to climate change (Ciplet et al., 2015; Dietz et al., 2020; Fisher, 2004; Henderson, 2019). Equally, institutions, both global and local, governmental and non-governmental, are vital for understanding the flows of power that enable and constrain responses to climate change by sporting entities. As such, sociologists of sport need to ask, ‘Which institutions, sporting or otherwise, have the most power over sporting organisations’ responses to climate change?’ as well as exploring the points of tension within these institutions and policy networks that stem from them. In doing so, sociologists of sport can more effectively consider the socio-political and geo-political environment in which sporting organisations respond to climate change. For example, we might consider the power of international governing bodies in framing and resourcing local responses to climate change in sport, as well as how geopolitical dynamics play out within these international bodies. Equally, in research on community and national sporting organisations, it is essential to consider the institutional power structures within which they are embedded and question how much power an organisation has within a given institutional environment.

As an illustration of this line of research, sociologists of sport could consider how the International Cricket Council's (ICC) inability to produce a sustainability plan has influenced a lack of climate action among national governing bodies outside of England. Equally, researchers might examine how India's economic and political dominance of global cricket has influenced attitudes towards climate change within the ICC and, in turn, how India's approach reflects the geopolitics of climate change outside of sport. Moreover, a researcher exploring responses to climate change by local cricket clubs must be attuned to the institutional pressures within which they are responding. Similarly, we might investigate the corporate power structures that allow fossil fuel companies to continue to sponsor sporting franchises, competitions and global mega-events, despite the professed environmental concerns and credentials of these organisations, such as FIFA's recent announcement of a sponsorship deal with the Saudi Oil giant Aramco.

These questions of institutions and power, of course, are not exclusive to sociology – indeed they intersect with the fields of politics and political economy, among others – but sociological approaches nonetheless allow us to explore the institutional context in which sporting organisations relate to climate change and the interplay of power within and between these institutions.

In addition, sociologists of sport must engage with questions of social stratification at the global and local levels, which have also been a feature of sociological research into climate change (Featherstone, 2015) and the critical sociological tradition (Bhatasara, 2015). Expanding on this research, as well as existing research within the sociology of sport on inequality (Darnell and Millington, 2019; Donnelly, 1996), sociologists of sport have the potential to re-politicise climate vulnerability and ask ‘How is the relative vulnerability of sporting organisations influenced by pre-existing inequalities within and beyond sport?’ ‘How does the changing climate exacerbate these inequalities in sport?’ and ‘Which sporting stakeholders are most vulnerable to climate change?’

Thus a sociologist of sport taking up the challenge of climate change must not restrict their research to elite or professional sport, or the Global North. For example, a sociological reading of the impact of climate change on basketball might go beyond the professional game, especially in Western Europe and North America. Instead, we can also consider amateur and informal community basketball, which is more likely to be played outside in some community regions. We can also investigate which regions and which players are more likely to be exposed to climate change and which entities and participants have the capacity to adapt. In doing so, we evoke core sociological questions of class, gender and race, as well as the exigencies of global capitalism.

Indeed, given sport ecology's predominant research focus on and within Western Europe and North America, it is essential to learn the lessons of global sociology (Bhambra and de Sousa Santos, 2017) and the decolonisation of the discipline (Connell, 2018). This would require sociologists of sport to consider both the cultural differences at play in the globally varied framings of climate change, sustainability, and climate justice, as well as the colonial relations of power that influence these cultural differences. For example, we might ask ‘How do environmental demands placed on sporting organisations in the Global South by global governing bodies and the organisations in the Global North reproduce the ongoing dynamics of colonisation?’ This question is particularly pertinent in sports that spread through British colonisation, especially cricket, football, golf and rugby.

Moreover, a strong critical thread within sociological research on climate change focuses on the apparent contradiction between the demand for economic growth within global capitalism and ecological sustainability (Islam and Kieu, 2021). In particular, we need to ask ‘Can the global sports industry continue to expand while addressing climate change in a meaningful way?’ Put differently, ‘Is the expansion of global sports industries through a treadmill of growth compatible with ecological sustainability?’ Wilson and Millington's (2015) critique of ecological modernisation is an important starting point for this line of research and researchers working within the sociology of sport can mobilise these questions when exploring responses to climate change by professional and global sporting entities, such as American sports leagues and FIFA, the European-based governing body of football, both of which articulate strong environmental commitments while expanding the very operations that are producing their problematic environmental impact.

In addition, sociological research on climate change has been attuned to language discourse, especially with regard to environmental communication and media representations of climate change (Boström and Uggla, 2016). Moreover, there is an already existing line of enquiry into discourse and media within the sociology of sport (Bruce, 2015; Rowe, 2015; Wagner and Sveinson, 2023). By mobilising existing frameworks within and outside of the sociology of sport, we can ask ‘What are the hegemonic discourses through which climate change is framed for and by sporting organisations, consumers, producers, and participants?’ and ‘How is the changing climate represented through sport?’ In doing so, we can critique the individual sustainability plans of sporting organisations and make connections between the discursive framing of climate change and climate change action to the context in which they are articulated.

Moreover, sociologists of sport can build upon the critical sociological tradition and its demands for social and climate justice (Dietz et al., 2020; Lockie, 2022) by considering the potential for, and existence of, more transformational approaches to managing sporting organisations’ impact on the environment. Consideration of these transformational approaches, which are marked by a shift from adjustments that allow a system to maintain its core functions to a move to a new system altogether (Johnson et al., 2017: 11–12), are often foreclosed within post-political managerial research. As such, we might ask, ‘What are the barriers to mitigation and transformation for specific sporting entities and participants?’ and ‘What could a transformative environmental social justice movement look like in and through sport?’ Here sociology lends itself to understanding pro-environmental forces within sport (Amann and Doidge, 2023) as well as the dynamics of social movements that could emerge through sport and in response to sport. As an illustration of this potential, Knowles et al. (2024) have recently expanded the long-standing interest in athlete activism within the sociology of sport to climate activism.

These questions are certainly not exhaustive – sociologists of sport might also engage with climate denialism, the non-human and theoretical and methodological concerns – and do not necessarily need to be asked by sociologists of sport or explored within sociological outlets. Sociology is an exporter discipline (Holmwood, 2010) that has ‘spun out’ (Meer et al., 2016: 836) to other disciplines, creating a ‘sociological diaspora’ (Goodwin, 2016: 979) that is particularly prominent in the sociology of sport (Wenner, 2017). Sociological perspectives have enabled ‘importer’ disciplines to ask more effective questions while also enriching themselves in this exchange (Halford and Southerton, 2023). As such, not only does the sociology of sport need to engage more directly with concerns around the natural environment, but an embrace of sociological insights would allow disciplines and sub-disciplines such as sport ecology to ask different questions of their subject matter. In turn, a sociology of sport and climate change would do well to recognise, if critically, the insights of the likes of sport ecology, rather than start anew. A concern with the social cannot be the sole preserve of sociology. And yet, the capacity of sociology, and sociologists of sport, to ‘see it as a whole’ is an invaluable resource for expanding the scope of social science research on the bidirectional relationship between sport and climate change.

Conclusion

In his editorial for the inaugural issue of Environmental Sociology, Lockie (2015: 1) argued that

As the scale of human intervention in the Earth's ecosystems and climate grows, and as the magnitude of risk associated with global environmental change becomes clearer, it seems inconceivable that any social science could ignore the relationships between the environment and society.

While calling for multidisciplinary collaboration, Lockie goes on to suggest that climate change ‘is without doubt a profoundly social phenomenon’ and thus ‘there is a distinctive role for the sociological imagination’. And yet, the sociology of sport continues to focus its imagination elsewhere, leaving other fields to frame the increasingly traumatic encounter between sport and climate change. The time has come for the sociology of sport to engage with the questions posed by climate change and its relationship with the natural environment.

Sport might be threatened by the changing climate, but it is not inevitable that this threat is experienced unevenly or is sport inherently unsustainable. Instead, it is the social conditions in which sport is produced, reproduced, and consumed that create this unequal vulnerability and unsustainability. It should be the task of the sociology of sport to see this challenge as a whole and to establish a research agenda that allows us to place the bidirectional relationship between sport and climate change in a social context. This paper is an initial step in that challenge.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Chris McMillan

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