Prepare Your Sports Venue For Environmental Resilience

With June being the start of hurricane season, it is important for organizations of all kinds, including sports venues, to be prepared for more extreme climatic conditions and natural disasters. Arenas, stadiums, and ballparks need to consider possible catastrophic events and appropriately prepare resources and environmental resilience plans.

APTIM’s Sustainable Sport Index survey—a resource for professional, minor league, and collegiate sports venues assessing environmental and social sustainability practices—has added a section to their annual survey to collect information on environmental resilience preparations and practices, including the crucial steps for preparedness below.

For those interested, the survey is open until early August. Contact Play@SustainableSportIndex.com to participate.

Identifying Climate Risks for Your Venue

The first step in preparing your venue for natural disasters is to recognize potential vulnerabilities to climate change. Both acute shocks, such as severe weather, and chronic stressors, such as increased temperatures and humidity, can pose a threat to the health and safety of players, staff, and community. Consider the following climate risks which could affect your venue:

• Extreme heat
• Extreme cold
• Flooding
• Heavy rain or storms
• Drought
• Wildfire
• Sea-level rise
• Hurricanes
• Tornados

Creating a Climate Adaptation Plan

Once you have identified the risks to your venue, creating a plan is the next step to mitigating them. Both operational and infrastructural components are required for a successful strategy. For instance, operational plans involve the management of human and other resources, such as:

Infrastructure plans, on the other hand, are equally as important yet involve primarily physical assets, such as:

Resource Your Plan

Your preparation does not end once your plan is on paper. Resourcing your plan with funding, workforce training, subject matter expertise (e.g., in-house or contracted), and community engagement are critical for your intentions to be realized in a state of emergency.

Survey Launch

If you are interested in learning more about sustainability and environmental resilience best practices of sports venues, we encourage you to participate in the Sustainable Sport Index survey. At the close of the survey in mid-August, our team will analyze the self-reported data to produce a public, anonymized benchmarking report providing an overview of venue sustainability practices. Additionally, each respondent receives a confidential, customized report at no-cost. Please contact Play@SustainableSportIndex.com if you have a venue that would like to participate.

Contact
Meredith McCurdy
Marketing Strategy Director
Meredith.McCurdy@APTIM.com