Chair: sport must lead the way on climate change

Our chair, Chris Boardman, has reiterated his call for sport and physical activity to be a key player in the worldwide fight against climate change.

The former Olympic cycling champion wants our sector to lead the way because of its immense reach through the local sports clubs that are embedded in every community, and the power of its star personalities to advocate on a global level.

Chris is attending COP29 in Azerbaijan, where he delivered a speech on Monday making the case for sport to be at the heart of global climate change policies. He also took part in a panel discussion entitled Sports for Climate Action: Playing to Win Against Climate Change.

And ahead of that visit he wrote a piece for the i newspaper in which he made the case for sport collectively making thousands of small environmental sustainability improvements that add up to something significant.

"Not only is this an approach that will work with climate change, it's possibly the only one that will," he wrote.

"I hold this positive outlook because I can see the thousand small, practical changes we can make that, if enacted by every leader, person, community and sector, will see us prevail.

"For all of those incremental actions to be made, we need to be able to reach out into the world of business and down into the heart of communities to motivate and galvanise action. I believe only sport has the ability to do this.

"Sport brings out the best in us. Muddy kickabouts, weekly swimming and gym classes that turn strangers into friends. The atmosphere of pride that permeates the public mood when a national team is doing well - and the carnival of joy that's unleashed if we win, people leaping off pub benches and into each other's arms - is testament to its power to connect.

"At a community level, there are more than 75,000 sports clubs in England alone. Situated in every neighbourhood, village, town and city across the country, grassroots clubs provide an unparalleled 'delivery network'. These clubs did not cause the climate crisis, but they can be part of the solution."

Chris also discusses this notion of 'marginal gains', which was popularised by British Cycling during his time there, in his foreword to Every Move - our first-ever environmental sustainability strategy launched earlier this year.

In it we pledged £45 million of new National Lottery funding to make our sector greener and more sustainable.

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