Circularity in Sports Events

Within the framework of implementation of the SDGs, in particular SDG 12, enabling tourism stakeholders to embrace circular economy principles appears essential to advance the decoupling of the sector’s economic growth from the use of resources and its ecological impacts. Fostering the application of innovative solutions and business models that promote closed material loops and create value through restoration, regeneration and re-use of resources is thus of utmost importance. Integrating circularity in the tourism’s value chain has the potential to accelerate the pace of change given its connections with other economic sectors and high exposure to consumers, hence triggering impacts that go well beyond the sector. Sports events attract large numbers of tourists and enhance the positioning of destinations within domestic and international markets while offering opportunities to minimize seasonality.

“Mega” sports events may also “speed up the construction of social and economic infrastructures” , leaving the positive legacy to the host destination and contributing to its development. Such events also have the potential to catalyze the change, due to their capacity of reasoning among population and more specifically young people, awareness raising being key to insure effective integration of SCP patterns in our economies. The objectives of the webinar are to:

– Learn about existing circular solutions applied already in large sports events – Discuss the potential of integration of circularity in sports events (including legacy aspects for host destinations and sports communities and more broadly, awareness raising among the general public)

– Explore how large sports events may become incubators of innovative circular solutions. Moderator: Carlota Estalella (UN Environment)

Speakers: Katherine Adams (BRE group), Julia Pallé (Formula E Holdings), Yoan Noguier (Yunus Sports Hub)

This year’s cycle of webinars on tourism and the circular economy are the result of collaboration between the leading members of the One Planet – Sustainable Tourism Programme (UNWTO and governments of France, Morocco and Republic of Korea) and UN Environment.

The Sustainable Tourism Programme of the One Planet network.