Sport policy should stop treating climate change as someone else's problem and start preparing coaches for adaptive responses built around four elements: risk perception, knowledge acquisition, the ability to prioritise hazards, and the integration of measures into organisational strategy. Only then, the authors argue, can coaches move from improvising one-off fixes to playing an active role in sport's climate adaptation. That is the central finding of the pre-print study "Sport and climate change: 'Bottom up' manager perspectives of climate impacts, climate adaptation and implications for sport policy" by G. Dingle and colleagues.
The researchers set out to test a specific hypothesis linking sport and climate adaptation: could sport coaches, faced with climate change, become "transformative actors" capable of rethinking how training is organised from the ground up? So far, the data tell a story of failure. Those running clubs and facilities are sticking to small, one-off fixes rather than genuine transformation.
The findings are based on a survey of 22 managers from regional sport organisations, local clubs and municipal authorities. To cope with extreme heat, 18.9% increase athletes' fluid intake, another 18.9% cancel, postpone or shorten matches, 16.2% apply a formal heat policy, 16.2% add more breaks, 10.8% use ice to help players recover, and a further 10.8% move sport to the evening or install shade structures. Only 2.7% take no countermeasures at all.
When it comes to extreme rainfall, inertia takes over instead. 38.5% do nothing to adapt, either because they don't see it as a problem, lack the resources, or simply don't know what to do. Another 23.1% give vague answers. Only 15.4% actively plan for the risk, and a further 15.4% have upgraded infrastructure to cope with increasingly sudden downpours.
To explain why heat triggers more concern than rain, the authors point to "risk perception": people tend to act on dangers they can see and feel on their own skin - shortness of breath, athletes collapsing on the pitch - rather than on a more abstract, indirect risk. Heat is felt immediately, whereas the rise in extreme rainfall is, for now, less visible in a club's day-to-day life, even though its financial consequences - refunds, maintenance, damage - are often more significant.
One key issue the authors raise is the policy void on climate in sport. Australia's national sport strategy, Sport Horizon (2024-2034), mentions a "changing climate" but offers no guidance on how to respond, while its predecessor, Sport 2030, did not mention climate at all. Cricket Australia's strategic plan acknowledges "how vulnerable our game is to a changing climate", but again with no practical guidance for clubs; for football, tennis and triathlon, no official document mentions the issue at all. The same gap shows up beyond Australia: Sport England has signed up to the UN's Sports for Climate Action framework and aims to "reduce its overall climate impact", without explaining what those impacts are or how to adapt, while sport policy in the European Union and Canada makes no mention of climate change at all.
The paper argues, in any case, that "one-size-fits-all" sport policy doesn't work in large, climatically fragmented countries like Australia. Extreme heat, for instance, affects all four sports across all four climate zones studied, but drought damages cricket and football pitches without directly touching triathlon, which takes place on water and roads, while flooding is a serious problem in subtropical and tropical zones but far less so in temperate and semi-arid ones. Sport policy, the authors argue, therefore needs to be calibrated to climate zones.
In smaller countries with a more uniform climate, such as the Netherlands or Singapore, a single national policy can make sense. Governance needs to shift accordingly: where the climate varies widely, decentralised networks of local decision-makers, able to tailor guidance to their own areas, work better than one central command centre.
The paper also proposes a model for identifying where managers can genuinely make a difference. A coach can persuade the club to move training to cooler hours; a local council officer can redesign sports facilities; a regional or state official, by developing a climate risk strategy, can push federations to take the heat problem seriously. In this three-tier model - local, regional, national - each manager can set an example for the level above. The research also identifies the limits of that influence: a lack of specific climate change expertise and the financial resources needed to turn good intentions into concrete action.
One further finding stands out: managers' own climate literacy. Despite having no formal training, interviewees showed a decent grasp of basic climate and climate change concepts, drawing mainly on the app of the Bureau of Meteorology, Australia's weather service. The problem, then, is not individual ignorance but the fact that the topic rarely comes up in club or federation meetings. To close that gap, the authors suggest adapting existing programmes, such as Australia's Community Coaching Framework, which was designed to deliver tailored training for coaches.
The study is set in Australia, a country six times the size of western Europe, where sport is worth AUD 50 billion, or 2-3% of GDP. Out of a population of 27 million, 11 million adults and 3 million children play sport every year, supported by more than 70,000 local clubs, 100 national federations and over 530 local councils that manage sport facilities.
Australia's climate has already changed: average temperatures have risen by 1.4°C since 1910, with extreme heat days increasing across every month. The country has grown drier in some areas and wetter in others - since the 1990s, rainfall between April and October in the south-west and south-east has dropped by 12-16%, though when it does rain, it rains harder.
The authors place sport among the sectors most exposed to climate change, alongside agriculture, tourism and construction, and identify three vulnerable areas: people (athletes, officials), places (fields, facilities) and organisations (clubs, federations). Research on sport and climate is still in its infancy: before this study, only two papers had looked at transformative adaptation in sport. Hence the decision to start "bottom-up", by listening to the people who live sport every day.
The research combines qualitative and quantitative methods: managers' accounts are collected and analysed first, then checked against survey data.
The sample, approved by La Trobe University's Ethics Committee (no. HEC20408), was built in three steps: selecting four very different Australian climate zones (cold semi-arid, temperate oceanic, humid subtropical, tropical monsoon); choosing four outdoor sports played at community level (cricket, football, tennis, triathlon); and, for each sport-climate combination, involving managers from regional sport organisations, local clubs and local councils.
Of the 36 managers contacted, 22 agreed to take part, resulting in 23 semi-structured interviews (one person answered for two climate zones). The interviews, recorded on Microsoft Teams and transcribed, were supplemented with internal documents such as club plans and reports. To analyse them, the researchers followed Braun and Clarke's six phases of reflexive thematic analysis: 470 first-level codes were narrowed down to 104 categories, and finally to five overarching themes, using NVivo 15 software.
The online survey, run on the QuestionPro platform, asked two open-ended questions about the most frequently mentioned climate hazards - extreme heat and extreme rainfall - which were analysed using descriptive statistics given the small sample size. The authors caution that the results should be read as indicative rather than conclusive, and suggest extending the research to other sports, other climate zones and a longer observation period.
