The desire to drive short term commercial success is blinding football’s key decision makers to the existential threat football faces from a hotter and less stable climate.

To be a cricket fan in 2024 is to be climate stressed. But there are glimmers of hope.

Sport is full of teams that cannot reproduce their unbeatable home form when they are playing away. So is banking.

Climate change is impacting the performance of athletes at the Paris Games and it’s causing problems for spectators and organisers too. 

Sport could showcase what a green transition looks like, reimagined with qualities of health, joy and fairness, tackling hard issues like pollution from travel and greenwash from sponsors.

As summer rolls on, major polluters continue to use international and beloved sports as billboards to promote themselves. From The Euros (sponsored by Qatar) and the Tour de France (sponsored by Ineos), to international cricket (Saudi Aramco) and the Olympics (Air France, Toyota, Accelor Mittal), this greenwashing is everywhere.

Sport is a story machine. As seasons, years and careers roll by, sport constantly resets. With every refresh a new story cycle begins. We devour rivalries, the twists of an athlete’s career, the troubled relationships between managers, coaches, players, teams, supporters and even the reporters who feed us the stories.

In 2030 we’ll either be fully engaged in positive transformative adaptation or we’ll have missed the narrow window of opportunity to secure a liveable world. If we messed up, then we would be managing the effects of our crazy climate causing the collapse of our food and fresh water systems, our ecological and our social systems. My heart aches at the thought so I switch my focus.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games are the pinnacle of global sports, boasting a history that dates back to 776 BC. Over the centuries, the Games have endured natural disasters, cultural shifts, and even genocidal regimes. Now, however, their future is under threat from an unprecedented challenge: the climate crisis.

Prolific artist and former amateur athlete Judith Dean has created two new paintings for the Cool Down Network and the Badvertising Campaign: ‘Own Goal’ and ‘Finish Line'.

Before the beginning of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, multiple athletes have come forward to warn that extreme heat poses risks to their lives at the latest Olympic Games.