When cricket and climate collide

Presumably, the succeeding Education Minister, Dan Tehan, agrees with the researchers that sport and media’s environmental impact, both actually negative and potentially positive, is indeed a priority matter.

The 17 signatories to the 2018 United Nations’ Sports for Climate Action Framework unequivocally think so.  Among them are the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), National Basketball Association (NBA), World Surf League, and the Rugby League World Cup 2021.

In the interest of full disclosure, I provided advice on the ARC project when it was in development, but I was not an applicant.  Raising it here is not an exercise in score settling, but to emphasise how cricket’s environmental problems in Australia and around the world can help reinforce the vital importance of these issues for other sports and the societies that sustain them.

Many sports lovers do not to think too deeply about the actual environmental costs of their favourite pastime.  These range from media energy use to travel-related carbon emissions to unrecyclable waste.  Greenwashing sport by the corporate public relations apparatus of many major sports organisations generates misleading environmental alibis.

Sport makes much of its outdoor, healthy image and for many people, including me, a great deal of enjoyment has been derived from the sensory pleasure of playing and the sociable fun of watching it in the stadium (violence and bigotry excepted) and on screen (airheaded commentary excepted).

It is increasingly difficult, though, to look away when sport is demonstrably implicated in anthropogenic climate change.  But sport can also help to counteract it, both by example and by strategic use of its intimate connection to the media in communicating new ways of addressing profound environmental issues.

Such a publicly proactive approach to planetary health by cricket and other sports would certainly provide something to cheer for, both on and off the pitch.