Advancing sustainable sport event management and sport ecology: the missing links

Concerns about the impact of sport events on the environment coupled with climate change create new challenges for sport events and subsequently the urgent need to enable their adaptation. The increasing environmental attention has given rise to notions of sustainable sport event management and sport ecology. Nevertheless, these inherently interlinked domains have grown in scholarship separately in ontological terms without addressing common grounds and interests such as social-ecological systems, environmental leverage, portfolio management and climate change adaptation. The result is creating new disciplinary silos within the sport-related literature. Contrariwise, this article addresses the undercurrent divide by criticizing the dominion of conventional frames of event analysis and their limitations. We propose an alternative agenda for enabling event adaptation to climate change and more generally capturing the complex relationship between sport events and the environment. This entails a holistic, systems-based, social-ecological portfolio approach. We first present the climate challenges for sport event management. We then focus on the ontological-epistemological foundations of sport ecology and sport event management to reveal some inconvenient truths about their divide and suggest an integrative agenda for connecting the missing links between these poorly linked domains. In doing so, we propose a shift from a reductionist to a holistic-relational lens, by explaining the limitations of the ‘singularist’ tradition in research pertinent to sport events and sustainability. This mentality can eventually serve as a foundation for formulating a broader ‘event ecology’ paradigm within the leisure sphere that enhances the adaptability of events.