Raising Environmental Responsibility And Sustainability For Sport Events: A Systematic Review

Sport events and associated venues impose a significant impact on the environment. Athletes, coaches, officials, athletes’ entourage, and spectators travel to sport competitions using planes, trains, buses and cars. This inherent travel component results in greenhouse gases and has a significant impact on climate change. Sport event merchandise, sporting goods and equipment produce a plethora of products that require natural resources. All of these, and many more sport event related activities, have environmental consequences such as waste production, land, air and water pollution, and deterioration of the natural environment. New ways of encouraging environmentally responsible practices and climate change mitigation are globally emerging with efforts to construct sport event venues with materials that cause minimal harm to the environment, choose environmentally friendly air- conditioning facilities and utilise renewable energy resources. However, these efforts represent the beginning of a long journey to establishing benchmarks and encourage changes in event manager’s and event consumer’s behaviours toward environmentally friendly sport events and venues. This special issue advances dissemination of research output in this critical and under-researched field and contributes to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the environmental issues of sport events and their management.

Keywords: Sustainability; Sport events; Environmental awareness; Environmental sustainability