Environmental sustainability is one of three key areas in which we are prioritising in regard to powering positive change.
Sport is enjoyed by millions of participants and fans across the country from grassroots to the elite level, delivering huge social and economic value through improved health and wellbeing, connecting communities and supporting economic growth.
Our natural and built environments provide the spaces for people to be active or enjoy the experience of sporting events. But climate change and wider environmental degradation as a result of pollution, biodiversity loss , extreme temperatures and resource consumption present a clear threat both to our way of life and to our sector.
In response we are supporting the sports and events into which we invest to catalyse action, alongside improving our own organisation’s environmental performance. We will use our voice to inspire others to act, using our networks and creativity to nurture solutions to complex sustainability challenges in the high-performance community and beyond.
On 28 March 2023, UK Sport published its Environmental Sustainability Strategy which includes a goal for high-performance sport to have a net positive impact on the environment by 2040. This ambition builds on a goal of reducing the negative environmental impact of UK Sport’s own activities and operations, to achieve net zero by 2030.
The strategy covers the period 2023-2025 and marks the first step in ensuring that the next generation of champions — the Team of Tomorrow — continue to deliver more extraordinary sporting moments. Discover more about the Team of Tomorrow via our campaign microsite.
UK Sport Environmental Sustainability Strategy
What we’re doing
Understanding our carbon footprint
In order to understand our carbon footprint, UK Sport have worked with an independent consultancy to produce our Emissions and Decarbonisation report.
This report verifies our carbon emissions for the 2021/22 base year, establishing an ambitious decarbonisation target, and includes a decarbonisation action plan.
We will use this work to help provide leadership, guidance, and inspiration to the high-performance sport sector, and support National Governing Bodies to calculate their own organisational carbon footprints and develop environmental sustainability action plans.
UK Sport Emissions and Decarbonisation Report
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Working together
Sport and Environment Climate Coalition (SECC)
We are a member of a collective of UK sports organisations as part of the Sport and Environment Climate Coalition (SECC). The coalition was recognition of the fact we need to change the way we operate now to reduce our environmental impact and contribute to wider efforts to reach net zero.
The purpose of the SECC is to lead and coordinate the sector’s efforts on climate change and environmental sustainability.
The group will harness the sector’s collective resources to help reduce the environmental impact of sport, recreation and physical activity and contribute to the UK’s transition to net zero.
Our UN Sports for Climate Action commitment
We are a signatory of the UN Sports for Climate Action Framework, which commits us to halving our carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving net-zero by 2040. Our own target exceeds this and we are aiming to achieve net zero by 2030.
We will be urging all Olympic and Paralympic sports and our partners to align themselves to the UN Sports for Climate Action’s five principles. As we have a collective responsibility to act and accelerate our work to ensure sport is sustainable for future generations .