Call for Papers | “Sport and Climate Change”, Special Issue of Sport in Society | Call ends February 1, 2024

• • • Marie Larneby, Senior lecturer in Sport Science, Malmö University
      marie.larneby@mau.se
    • Daniel Svensson, Assistant Professor in Sport Science, Malmö University
      daniel.svensson@mau.se
    • Susanna Hedenborg, Professor in Sport Science, Malmö University
      susanna.hedenborg@mau.se

Climate change already has affected sports in many ways. Athletes suffer from having to perform in extreme heat, winter events are cancelled due to lack of snow or moved because of warmer climate (Bernard et al., 2021). Some landscapes for training and competition are threatened by drought, erosion, and rising sea levels. These issues are becoming increasingly important and there is an urgent need for more research on how climate change will impact sports (McCullough & Kellison, 2018; Orr & Inoue, 2019). Simultaneously, there is also a growing awareness about how sports impact the environment in negative ways. Many sports have strong links to and appreciation of nature, yet their environmental impact remains problematic (McCullough et al., 2022; Svensson et al., 2023; Wilson & Millington, 2020).

The overall aim of this Special Issue is to pinpoint research-based options for sports to work proactively with climate change through informed management, combining innovation and tradition at a global scale. These include:

• • • the environmental potential of outdoor sports and traditional connections to nature (Schut, 2016);
    • the role of technological innovation and new digital forms of training and competition to mitigate climate risk (Tjønndal et al., 2022);
    • the role of sustainable development among instructors and guides in relation to sport landscapes and seasonality (Larneby, forthcoming); and
    • the tensions between elite sport logics of performance and the ambition to reduce sports’ environmental impact (Svensson et al., 2023).

It is also important to address how different geographical regions will tackle the challenges and issues climate change poses to sport performance.

United Nations’ Agenda 2030 suggests 17 global sustainable development goals (SDG) which are an urgent call for action by all countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership. For instance, physical activity and health are intrinsic to human development of human beings and are addressed specifically in SDG 3, and yet there is an environmental cost to sport and physical activity. This contradiction raises challenges around how to achieve and sustain equal access to sport and physical activity at a global scale, and how to mitigate the impact on the local environment.

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