Ahead of the 2024 games in Paris, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) asked all Olympic sports to prepare sustainability strategies. Sustainability, it said, was central to the Olympic movement. But some sports didn’t respond at all, and there is a wide gap between the best and worst performers.
Colleagues and I at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Responsible Business have analysed the published sustainability strategies of the 34 international federations that between them govern all permanent Olympic sports.
Our aim in studying these publicly available strategy documents was not to assess a sport’s current measures of sustainability, such as its carbon emissions, but rather to evaluate each international federation’s level of engagement and ambition. The documents give us a sense of each sport’s future direction.
