COP 28: Sports have responsibility to change fan habits, says climate scientist Ed Hawkins

Alice Powell is a development driver at Envision Racing, who have teamed up with climatologist Ed Hawkins

Sports have a responsibility to change fan habits and help fight climate change, says one climate expert.

But the man behind Reading Football Club's 'warming stripes' says seeing some athletes making sacrifices in the face of the climate emergency is encouraging.

Professor Ed Hawkins has partnered with Formula E team Envision Racing, who will carry the stripes on their cars.

Hawkins said: "Every organisation has a responsibility to act."

He added: "I suspect everyone's not doing enough. They have a unique role to bring [sports] fans together and enact change."

Hawkins has been awarded an MBE for his climate work, including on the 'warming stripes', which have 173 colour-coded sections showing how much the planet's average temperatures have increased since 1850.

Reading wore the stripes on the sleeves of their kits last season, with each stripe on the shirts showing a year's average temperature since the club was founded in 1871.

Speaking to BBC Sport from the United Nations' Commission for Climate Change conference COP 28 in Abu Dhabi, Hawkins said: "Sporting organisations have to look inwardly at their sources of emissions themselves, and reach out to fans to talk about their own journey, make changes and inspire fans to make changes."

In June, football's world governing body Fifa was accused of making false claims the 2022 World Cup was "fully carbon neutral".

Hawkins, 46, added: "Sport reaches an enormous audience and an audience who might not normally talk about these issues. We need everyone on board to enable those conversations to happen."

Envision Racing, who won last season's Formula E championship teams title, have an association with the COP events and will display warming stripes on next year's cars according to the location in which they race.

A number of athletes have made sacrifices by deciding not to compete at events, at the expense of career progression, if the travel is considered too detrimental to the environment, including 17-year-old GB runner Innes Fitzgerald.

Hawkins added: "It's inspiring to see athletes make a difficult decision about their careers, sacrificing the chance to win medals for their principles, and that should make others stand up and notice what they are doing.

"We as a society need to think really hard about the travel we make over the next few decades. If we do not reach net-zero emissions then the world will keep on warming.

"Weather will be more severe and affect everyone's ability to watch sport, whether it will be events becoming too hot, or with flooding in the UK, where we're having fixtures getting called off, and we're seeing an increase in heavy rainfall.

"It's affecting sports already, and those effects will continue to get worse."

Are our pitches really muddier thanks to global warming?

A recent study showed that grassroots sports had been affected by adverse weather conditions related to climate change.

But some ask if climate change is really a direct influence on weather which is typical in certain seasons, including the storms which have already affected elite sport during the autumn.

"The heatwaves we had, last summer it reached 40 degrees in the UK for the first time," said Hawkins. "And that's not possible without climate change. Every heatwave is now hotter than it would otherwise have been.

"Yes, we have always had unusual situations which cause hot weather, but with those same patterns today the weather is even hotter. The effect on people's lives, especially outdoors, means it's worse.

"Autumn or winter storms will drop more rain today than 100 years ago because the atmosphere is warmer.

"It's basic physics: as you warm the atmosphere it can hold more water, it can be moister, which means when it rains it rains more, and you can see that rainfall is more intense, which increases the risk of flooding, as we've seen across the country."

Meanwhile, all-electric off-road series Extreme E has announced it will form a hydrogen working group alongside Formula 1 and motorsport's world governing body the FIA, as it prepares to launch the new Extreme H series, promoting the development of hydrogen-powered vehicles.