2024/08/28 by Chris McMillan
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking #Sport and Mega-Event Impacts #Sports, Gender, and Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/10126902241268182
openalex publication_date 2024/08/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Climate change poses an existential, if varied, threat to sport. Equally, sporting activity is having a substantial impact on the natural environment, an impact to which sporting bodies have been slow to quantify and mitigate. Despite this bidirectional threat, social science research on the relationship between sport and climate change is underdeveloped. Much of the existing research is generated by scholars within sport management and the nascent sub-discipline of sport ecology, both of which tend to focus on organisations’ and managerial responses to climate change. By contrast, climate change and the natural environment have been understudied within the sociology of sport. In this paper, I argue that the limited contribution of sociological perspectives to the debate has restricted the ability to critically examine the social context within which sport and climate change intersect. In response, I advocate for the value of a sociological approach and propose a research agenda for examining climate change within the sociology of sport.