Towards a new approach to hosting sports mega-events in the era of climate change: the climate resilience framework

Rapid changes to the climate have impacted on the planning, implementation, and legacies of major sports events due to extreme conditions, escalating expenditures, resource limitations, and heightened demands for environmental responsibility. At present, sustainability frameworks utilised in sporting events are in part fragmented, tend towards the generic, or are simply inadequate to address the specific vulnerabilities of the sports events’ ecosystem. This mismatch is exacerbated by the fact that sports mega-events (SMEs) are increasingly taking place in challenging climates (e.g. Qatar andSaudi Arabia) and are becoming more bombastic. SMEs are especially vulnerable to the impact of climate change, given their substantial consumption of resources on one hand, and their ecological impact on the other. Current approaches to hosting SMEs tend to concentrate mostly on carbon accounting or infrastructure efficiency, neglecting wider climate-related hazards such as heatwaves, air pollution, biodiversity deterioration, and disruptions to supply chains and transportation. By building on previous work, we advance the argument that a more tailored approach is urgently needed and introduce a new framework designed specifically for SMEs in the climate change era, structured around six core pillars: ethics, agility, flexibility, vulnerability management, mitigation, and collaboration. To illustrate its practical value, the framework is applied to the case study of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games 2024 as a test case, highlighting how it can enhance resilience to support sports events and planners better respond to climatic impact.