Instant Genius - How a heating planet is changing sports

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

We can see climate change in our food, holidays and even day-to-day life, but one area we rarely think about is our sports. And yet, climate change could completely change how we play and experience sports all together. We spoke to Madeleine Orr, the author of the new book Warming Up to learn a little bit more about how sports will be changed by a changing climate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit nameadio.com to learn more. Hello, I'm Alex Hughes. And this is the Instant Genius podcast, a bite-sized masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. Climate change affects everything. We see it in our day-to-day experiences, the weather and the world around us. But one area we might not naturally think of is sport.

Football, cricket, F1, sailing. Pretty much any sport you can think of is being affected by climate change right now. So what does that mean for the future of sporting? We spoke to Madeline Orr, the author of the new book, Warming Up, to learn more about how climate change is impacting sport. She explains the problems the sports industry faces under climate change, breaks down misconceptions, and highlights what the future of sport might look like. So climate change can be, I guess, difficult to identify sometimes.

It almost feels like this thing that's just floating around, is hanging around all of us. when we talk about climate change effects on sport, what are some real life examples of this actually happening? There's a few examples in sport that really jump out to me and have over the years. The first one is winter sport. It's pretty clear that we're not getting as much snow anymore as we used to. And for those who enjoy skiing or snowboarding or maybe a bit of biathlon, that can feel like a big cultural loss. It's not like a sport that people, for some people, it's kind of a very competitive piece.

But for many people who ski and participate in those sports, it's a family thing or a thing you do with friends, maybe a bit of a holiday. And it definitely shapes your winter. And so to lose that is a bit of a hit. On the summer side, it runs the gamut from extreme heat. We're seeing that in all corners of the world. Certainly, if you've been in North America, you're up the last few months. You've definitely experienced some of the heat waves we've been having. And that's going to impact athletes in a number of different ways. And there's also obviously issues with the pitches. So if it's, either too much or too little water, right? So rain or drought or floods, any of these things can really disrupt sport. And so it's kind of one of those pieces where it's usually not life and death stakes, which does make it more accessible for people because it's not quite as scary, but it's disrupting people's day-to-day lives and the things that they love. And it's something that is personal and cultural and therefore sticky as a topic for talking about climate change.

And you kind of hint at it there, but it's not just, I guess, sports where, you know, it's based around snow or in very hot climates, this is kind of just affecting everything now. It's everything. Yeah, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a sector of sport anywhere in the world that hasn't seen something. Even an indoor sport, we're starting to see some of these impacts, right? So you might be playing basketball or netball. And if you're in a place that's not air conditioned, the heat's going to impact you. If you're in a place impacted by a crazy storm, that is going to impact you. And these things can really add up over the course of a season and really disrupt quite a lot of play and that will impact people's morale, it'll impact the schedule,

it'll impact sales if it's a commercial property. So they really do add up and it's becoming kind of the problem that we can't ignore anymore. Obviously we're saying about indoor sports, that's one thing. But my mind instantly goes to something like sailing, for example, where this is in very much mother nature, you kind of can't hold back at all. In those sports where climate change really can show its highest level of wrath, what happens then? where, you know, it's totally unpredictable. Yeah, so those sports that happen out in nature, we call them nature-based sports. It's your sailing, it's your paddling sports, mountain biking, for example, trail running,

those kinds of things, where you really are exposed to the elements. They're seeing and feeling the impacts of those extraordinary storms. They're really seeing the impacts of really hot heat. You know, you think, oh, well, a sailor's on the water, they're getting wet. Actually, no. Like, they, ideally, you're not getting that wet. and the surface of the boat can get quite hot. And so you would experience the heat in a very different way.

This is something rowing has seen quite a lot of actually. There's some major issues with heat and rowing and canoe kayak. And when the storm rules in equally, they're on the front lines. It's just not happening, period. And so there have been instances where there have been major competition scheduled to occur, you know, in a given place at a given time. Everybody travels to be there. And then, you know, a storm rolls in. And for three days, nothing can happen.

and that really can disrupt all the things for a lot of people. And it really can be troubling to see that happen not just once in a season, but over and over again in different conditions in different places. And is this a conversation that kind of starts now, or have we been trying to talk about this for a long time? As climate change been affecting sports longer than you might expect? Yeah, I think people are surprised to hear that some of the earliest efforts to address this in sport actually started in the 1990s

because we started to see some of these patterns of weather changing, and that started to impact the way sports are performed in the business of sport and all of these things. But it wasn't until really 2018 that the public really caught on and that individual organizations within sport started to really switch on to this. And that was for a couple of reasons. One, we started seeing persistent occurrence of things like heat waves. So if you'll recall in 2019, in the course of, you know, a few weeks. There was a huge heat wave during the Women's World Cup that was held in France. And that was kind of European heat wave. People died. And then on the other side of the world, just months later, the Rugby World Cup was disrupted by a typhoon. So kind of two big events back to back disrupted.

And then a year later in Tokyo, it was the hottest Olympics on record. And then a year after that, we saw even more issues. So it's kind of become the thing that is the elephant in the room of every conversation in sport is we may not actually have the playing grounds that are safe to play at all. And then if we can't play, then what are we talking about? And obviously, it starts with, I don't know, a playing ground being flooded out or a pitch that becomes too hot to actually play on. But there's also this idea of, I guess, a change in injuries. You know, people are used to sprains and all this sort of stuff. We know how to prepare for that. But how do you prepare when a sport starts to have issues of heat stroke when, you know, a short sprint run,

has these issues of just the heat getting to you or this extreme weather that causes injuries that we aren't really prepared for? Yeah. You know, it's funny because the whole injury profile of certain sports is shifting, like you said, right? So in places like Eastern Africa, where running is the big thing, I spent some time in Kenya working with runners there. And it's interesting to see how they train. This is, you know, a small corner of the world that you wouldn't expect this level of

extraordinary athletic excellence just by looking at the town. You know, it's kind of a run-down town. It's very low-income. And yet they've turned out, you know, many, many Olympians, many Boston and London marathon winners, et cetera, et cetera. So you look around and one of the reasons that they're so, so good at this is because they have these beautiful clay roads that go on for miles and miles and miles and every direction. And that's what they're training on. And it's, you couldn't ask for a better surface because it's just forgiving enough that you don't get those lower extremity injuries that those of us who run on concrete or on the pavement might experience. And in recent years, because of the droughts, they're starting to notice that that clay is getting really hard. And so all

of a sudden, these lower extremity injuries are starting to crop up in a population that's never dealt with them before, or at least not to this extent. Similarly, in that region, the heat is starting to impact not just performance on the field and while they're running, but sleep patterns. And it's one that, you know, we discount sometimes because sleep happens very much away from the field. But if it's too hot for athletes to get good sleep, then that absolutely can disrupt all sorts of things. It will disrupt their appetite. It will disrupt their performance, their concentration. And certainly, you know, it'll do the same to any referees or officials. And that can impact the competitiveness of the game and the fairness of it. So there's all these kind of knock on effects

that happen around the sport that are impacting sport. And we'll see more of that in Paris. You know, we're facing down the Olympics that could beat out Tokyo for hottest on record. We're anticipating that some of the athletes will be an accommodation that are not air-conditioned. And therefore, again, we're facing that kind of question around what does sleep look like, what does recovery time look like? And some athletes will be happy with that. They're from hot climates, and that's totally fine. They're quite used to it.

Others, not so much. So it's going to be a bit of a mix. But certainly there's a question not just around the safety of conditions, but all the safety of conditions, not just for competitiveness and the game itself or the competition itself, but all of the training that has to happen and all of the recovery time around that. And, you know, are we able to train enough to avoid injuries as well, right? Like in sports like gateboarding or your downhill skiing or snowboarding, for example, where throwing tricks is the whole thing. If you don't have enough of a season to prepare those tricks to develop that

skill set on snow and come the time for the Olympics, so the the, you know, X games or whatever competition's coming up, you might not be able to safely do that. And that is going to threaten how fast these sports can develop into the future as well. So there's all these questions around injury. And I want to stress, it's not just the competition itself. It's everything around the competition, all the training, all the sleep, everything else. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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Something that I am quite interested in is we're talking about the current effects and we've spoken a little bit about what it has been like in the past. where do we sort of think about sports in the future, not three or four years down the line, but, you know, 20, 30 plus years later where the use effects really start to take place. Do we just have to then start to completely rethink how we do it? We might. I think people hear me say we might have to change the way sports work and they freak out. You know, sports is very traditional.

People pass on these traditions from parent to child and the community, etc. So people get very scared when I say we're going to have to change some things. I think it's, I want to emphasize we're not probably going to lose sports, certainly not a lot of sports. We might lose kind of certain variations of certain sports. And the changes that are needed are actually not that radical if you think about it. Most of the change is going to have to be scheduling. So if your typical football season kind of runs from one summer through to the next spring, we might see that shift slightly out of the summer and then it might end a little bit earlier.

So it might be a slightly shorter season. it's not going to be less fun. It's just going to be not happening in a heat wave, which avoids a lot of issues, right? Altogether. If you're skipping heat wave season, then we avoid a lot of the worst case scenarios right there. In North America, the big one that's being discussed at the moment is what happens with American football, which, you know, owns a whole day of the week, basically, and is religion in some parts of the country. And the challenge there is that, you know, it starts in the northern hemisphere's fall. Except that it coincides with hurricane season in the south. and a wildfire season in the West. And so more than half of the teams in the league are consistently facing these kinds of challenges. And so the ones who are facing challenges are asking for accommodation, what are we going to do? What is this going to look like? And the ones who are not facing issues are a bit reluctant to change anything because they potentially see the absence of climate threat as a competitive advantage. And so this is becoming attention within certain leagues around how do we adapt and how do we take care of all of the teams and all

of the athletes and all of the coaches and everybody else. The big one, like I said, is scheduling. That's going to be where we have to be a little more flexible. If we're able to reschedule, if we're able to build in like a week at the end of a season for games that or matches that had to maybe be rescheduled. So we know when that rescheduled match is going to happen. It's going to happen later. It's all good. We know when it's happening. That clears up a lot of things. The other pieces, we're going to have to start thinking about raising pitches, which literally means dig under, build up a level, and then kind of, kind of, of relayed the turf. It's not ideal, but in places like the UK and parts of Europe, many of our

sports pitches were traditionally built on floodplains. And the reason they were built there was because you weren't going to put homes there. And you certainly didn't want to put manufacturing because we knew that that might flood. It wasn't great for agriculture. So it became our sporting grounds in a lot of cities. So like you'll notice that if you look at a map of the UK and you look at where sporting grounds are. They tend to be very close to rivers. And surprise, surprise, this was on purpose. So we shouldn't be surprised when, you know, sea level rise happens and we start to see changes in our water tables that we should see a little bit more water landing on some of these fields, disrupting play. Just this year, UK sports said about 1,500 youth matches they expect are disrupted a year because of flooding and that this

will increase. So raising pitches gets us partway there. It's not perfect. It might mean that we have to wait through a bit of swampy land to get to the pitch, but the pitch itself should be safe. So these are the kinds of common sense small solutions that we're looking at. We're not saying cancel all sport. We're not saying everybody go inside. We're saying common sense small solutions that we make over the next 10 or 15 years that that over time add up and preserve all of our opportunities to play. And I think when we talk about climate change in sport, a lot of people's minds are going to

go to the big events, the NFL, the Euro, things like that. But it's sort of in the way that you touched on then. it's going to affect, you know, local sports as well. You're the Fiver Side, people's local cricket games, that sort of thing as well. Yeah, it's really easy to think about sport and to think about big sport. The Olympics and FIFA World Cups are flashy and they take up a lot of public attention. And so it's very easy to look at those and say, oh, well, those are going to be impacted. And the answer is, yeah, they definitely are going to be impacted.

I don't see a version of Paris that is not very hot. I can't imagine a version of the FIFA World Cup in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. that's not very hot. I expect we'll also see some wildfire smoke in part of that tournament. So there's challenges for sure. But most people engage with sport on a day-to-day basis in their own communities or following their own local teams. And so that's the level of analysis I find most interesting. And also it's probably most impactful just in kind of there's more grass at the grassroots, so to speak. So that's where a lot of us are focusing our attention at the moment. We know that the big events are flashpoints and we are going to continue to as sports,

ecologists use those opportunities to talk about this around Paris, around other events. I'm worried about the pipeline. I'm worried about our kids who are not going to get to play football anymore. I'm worried about the cricketers who are like maybe on the cusp as a teenager of do I stay, do I leave the sport? Do I commit to that next level? It's a lot of commitment to play a sport, particularly as you get more competitive, who may walk away because it's getting uncomfortable to play in certain conditions or that they commit to something for a season and then it gets disrupted. then they've, you know, there's opportunity costs to playing sport that we don't often think about because it's such a fun thing to do. But if you've committed to a season of playing cricket, for example, and then a good number of them are canceled and you've said no to other opportunities because you're playing cricket, you might start a second guess that decision next season.

And all of a sudden, we could lose people out of sport, which is not what we want to see happen. So there's this whole question around how does this impact us on the day to day? How does it impact our local communities, our children? And I think that ultimately in long term, that's where we have to start making these changes because that's what's going to impact our health and well-being and social lives. So maybe a bit of a side step, but I'm intrigued about the idea of, you know, we spoke a little bit earlier about sailing, for example. A lot of sports use the natural environment or golf courses, things like that.

Is there a way that we can balance sport and the protection of these sort of lands going forward, you know, ways that you can keep enjoying it, prepare for sort of the changes and also keep it safe and don't damage the land in that sense? Absolutely. There's, you know, a lot of use of grasses, for example, in turf-based sports that are not great for the environment. You know, I'm thinking of certain types of turf that are made from bad materials that you really don't want, you know, around your kid. There's also, you know, opportunities and issues around how do we preserve spaces for play, not just now, for safe reasons, but for later. And when you do that right, you actually open up the option of, you know, taking care of nature while we're at it and doing all

these other great things. So there's a Sports for Nature campaign currently being led by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. And their campaign is literally built around, like, it's kind of a buildback better idea of while we're at it, while we're taking care of people in the context of a changing planet, let's also build in all of these great things for pollinators and for birds and for animals that may have used this space before we used it for sport, but that can possibly rejoin the space in safe ways moving forward. So that's been a big campaign in the last few years. I expect we'll see much more of that in the coming years. Going back to, I guess, larger sports, the big events that we're watching, not to pinpoint one specifically, but I often

think of Formula One as, I guess, a sport that has a very big carbon emission attached to it. With sports like that is there almost an argument of them putting out a larger impact on this sort of issue than, I guess, something smaller like football? So everything is going to have a carbon footprint. I'm going to start by saying that. I'll also say that actually the biggest contributors to carbon footprints in most cases is us, as the fans. It's not actually the production of the event itself. It's not the shipping of the stuff or the people who are involved. So for that reason, actually Formula 1 doesn't have the biggest footprint in sport. You would think it does because it's cars and they're emitting fuels. It's not. It's actually some of the bigger sports like football that attract tens of thousands

of fans to each event. And they happen all of the time, dozens of them a year, as opposed to 24, that you get an F1. So it's important to kind of put these things into context. I also think that there's so many versions of contributing to the solution here that sometimes we miss. And so we focus on carbon footprint. And that's an important thing to focus on, of course. But we get kind of this myopic focus on carbon. And we stop focusing on. things like other technologies, developments in other spaces, water, biodiversity, like all of these things. And what F1 can do and has done in the past is introduce technologies that are going to come much faster through F1 because they have that research and development capacity that is way faster

and further developed than any other space and sport, really, that become immediately impactful on our day-to-day lives in terms of the way vehicles work on the roads in every part of the world. So for example, we wouldn't have seatbelts if it weren't for motorsport. And it seems like such a simple thing, but it's a huge deal that how many lives have been saved by sea belts. We're starting to see similar innovations coming out of places like F1 on things like carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is ubiquitous in the way all of our transport systems work right now. And they're starting to develop parts of cars and pieces that are recyclable or made from other materials that are not carbon fiber. Flax fiber, for example, I know McLaren had parts of the car made

from flax fiber. Like, that's great. If we can replace carbon fiber with flex fiber and they can do that at scale and then show the rest of the industry how to do it, all of a sudden, that's an option for things like planes and boats and cars and all these other things. So I think that there's an important opportunity to leverage whatever the superpower is of any individual heart of the sport sector, whether it's activating fans and getting them really passionate, which football probably does best, or educating people about the ocean, which I would say sailing is doing best. Or about the mountains which skiing is doing or about tech, which F1 can do, I think we have to leverage all of those superpowers.

And of course, lower the footprint while we're at it, absolutely. But we have to just think a bit beyond that. A lot of these sort of major sporting events, I think, are often both a source of pride for countries and cities that host, but it's also, you know, and very much an economic opportunity for them. Can events be, I guess, reimagined so that this remains a possibility while being environmentally friendly, or is it kind of just a bit of a give and take for that situation? I think there's absolutely opportunities to restructure some of these large events to be

environmentally friendly. And I think the big crux of it is that they used to be, right? Like the last time Paris hosted the Olympic Games, its carbon footprint would have been way smaller than this Olympic Games, even though we're currently saying, and Paris is saying that this is going to be the most carbon neutral games. The size and scope of these games is really the challenge. It's not the fact that they happen. It's not the fact that we have all these athletes come together or the coaches of the venues. Like really, that's not the problem. The problem is that it's become a tourism spectacle, that the way these things are structured and funded is by having tens or hundreds of thousands of people gather in a place for a big party to consume goods and

produce one used, which obviously is the afterthought. We're not actually focused on the goods and the waste, but that's what's happening and all the travel that comes with that and all the electricity and all the rest. So if we were to have a version of the games that wasn't quite as stark as Tokyo of like nobody in the stands because I think that's awful. Like I don't wish that on any athlete. I want them to have fans. But if it were smaller, right? So you still have the best in the world and all the media is still there. So everyone has the opportunity to watch from home.

But the actual stands are much smaller. We're selling fewer tickets. We're focusing on tickets for locals and maybe the parents of the athlete. Like I want them to have their people in the stands. But I think that there's a version of their. where it's a much scaled down event and it becomes more of a local thing as opposed to an international tourism spectacle. And all of a sudden, the scale and scope of that becomes much more manageable. We have a much more honest conversation about carbon footprint related to the event.

We actually can credibly offset the emissions of all of those athletes and coaches and staff that would travel and media for that matter. And the size of the venues that would be used would be much, much smaller. And those kind of smaller venues would get used in perpetuity because that community can sustain that. So I think the big, big elephant in the room is just the size, literally the size of the event. If we can scale it down and focus on locals, I think we get most of the way there. Based just on this conversation, but also your book, you know, touched on so many topics within climate change and sport, I'm intrigued just from your point of view, what is the, I don't want to say most important point, but what is it that people should

be taking away from this sort of conversation? I think that the most important, thing we can be doing about climate change is to talk about it and talk about in as many different contexts and conversations as we can and that it doesn't have to be a conversation always that's, you know, life and death stakes or about what we lose. We get so much conversation about climate change that's about losing our way of life or giving up this or that or the other. And that's just not a productive conversation. Of course, there are going to be changes that have to be made on a personal societal level. Absolutely. And that's going to be a huge part of it. But I think what sport offers us the opportunity to do is to have a conversation about what we gain when we get this right.

So when we solve for air quality or when we resolve some of the issues with flooding, not only do we get to preserve opportunities to play and all the health and social benefits that come with that, but that site might become an emergency resource distribution site. It might be a pollinator garden. It might also bring us, you know, better opportunities to gather as a community on non-sporting days, right? We've seen in the U.S. a huge shift from venues being used just for sport to venues being used during COVID as hospitals, field hospitals, as emergency distribution sites, now as election voting centers, like huge voting centers. And that's great. These spaces used to be historically the center of our communities. They have been used in that capacity during wartime. They can be used in that capacity in the climate era. But we have to rethink the point of sport. It's not just about performance and performance. competition. It's about community. It's about well-being. It's about preserving opportunities to gather and have fun into whatever future we might have. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Madline Orr on climate change and sport. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine,

which can find on sale now in supermarkets and news agents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music.

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