Playing the climate game: climate change impacts, resilience and adaptation in the climate-dependent sport sector

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to understand issues that climate change poses for major Australian sport stadia and the organizations that manage them, and any organizational responses to such issues. Like climate-dependent agriculture and tourism, the sport sector is potentially vulnerable to climate change impacts, yet has largely been overlooked in empirical research. The results reveal four primary climate change issues: organizational uncertainty; greater management complexity and cost risks associated with water and energy resources, and waste outputs. No revenue opportunities were evident. The results demonstrate that while most physical impacts are manageable, the primacy of commercial and operational imperatives determine organizational responses ahead of government climate policy, and any direct climate “signal” to adapt. Ten factors shape three organizational responses that we have typed using Berkhout’s [2012, Adaptation to climate change by organizations. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 3(1), 91–106] adaptation framework. The results challenge the assumption that climate change impacts and responses are limited to non-sport and leisure industries.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• climate change
• mitigation
• organization
• risk
• sport stadia
• vulnerability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.