Project researchers also carried out an on-site environmental impact analysis of the Zurich Weltklasse athletics meeting in 2022, which that year served as the Wanda Diamond League final. Results from that assessment appeared in the report, ‘Guidelines on Decarbonisation Practices for Athletics, Biathlon and Floorball’, published in August 2023.World Athletics played a leading role is […]
Project researchers also carried out an on-site environmental impact analysis of the Zurich Weltklasse athletics meeting in 2022, which that year served as the Wanda Diamond League final. Results from that assessment appeared in the report, ‘Guidelines on Decarbonisation Practices for Athletics, Biathlon and Floorball’, published in August 2023.World Athletics played a leading role is several of the project’s key milestones. One was a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) calculation of the environmental impact of the 2023 World Mountain and Trail Running Championships hosted by the Austrian cities of Innsbruck and Stubai.
Another important legacy of the project was the creation of an interactive database of sustainability best practices for sports events.
– to develop training modules to improve environmental knowledge;
The governance and management model analysis also played an active role in refining the Athletics for a Better World Standard, the system World Athletics implemented across all owned and licensed athletics events in January 2024 that evaluates, measures and scores an event’s achievement in sustainable delivery.
– to support the sports with strategic objectives, programmes and operational frameworks
The GAMES Project (Green Approaches in Management for Enhancing Sports), a unique multi-sport collaboration exploring how sports can improve and promote environmental sustainability practices at their events, marked its successful conclusion in March.
Ramsak, along with Tero Kalsta of the IFF and Riikka Rakic of the IBU, co-authored a chapter on environmental governancen in the sports sector in the book, ‘Integrity and Sustainability in Sport’, published in January 2025. The GAMES final report will be published on the project’s website in early April.
World Athletics Head of Sustainability Bob Ramsak also participated in two project conferences, its mid-term gathering hosted by the IBU in Oslo in February 2024 and at its final event in Malmö, Sweden in December, held on the sidelines of the 2024 Men’s World Floorball Championships, where he shared and discussed World Athletics sustainability initiatives.
The project launched in June 2022, with five key objectives:
– to leverage the popularity of the sports to broadly increase environmental awareness; and
The work was led by a team of researchers from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, who coordinated the project.
The 30-month European Commission Erasmus+ funded initiative brought together four sport organisations – World Athletics, the International Biathlon Union (IBU), the International Floorball Federation (IFF) and the Swedish Floorball Federation (SFF) – to explore how their respective sports can adopt more practices to mitigate their impact on climate change.
– to analyse the governance and management models used by the three sports and support the development of decarbonisation strategies for each partner.
– to raise awareness and increasing the adoption of climate change mitigation practices by key sports actors;
Other World Athletics initiatives associated with the project included ‘Building Collaborations for Sustainable Events’, a panel discussion hosted by Asics during the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest; and ‘How to Promote Sustainability at Major Events’, a webinar focusing on the strong leadership commitment to sustainability by the organisers of the 2024 World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, the most-watched from the GAMES Project-produced series of webinars.
