2025 Carbon Reduction Award Winners
Sporting Giants & Useful Projects
At the time, the UK Sport Sustainability Accelerator was the UK’s largest multi-sport sustainability initiative to date, supporting 30 Olympic and Paralympic National Governing Bodies (NGBs) to embed carbon reduction and sustainability across their operations. Delivered by Sporting Giants and Useful Projects for UK Sport, the two year programme demonstrated how collaboration across the sporting system can accelerate climate action and build long term capability.
Launched in 2023, the Accelerator was created to address a shared challenge across high performance sport: how organisations of different sizes, resources and levels of experience could measure their environmental impact and take meaningful action. Through a combination of hybrid workshops, expert led masterclasses, one to one support and peer learning forums, every participating NGB was supported to establish carbon baselines, develop climate action plans and identify practical opportunities for change.
The programme helped organisations move sustainability from being viewed as an additional operational challenge to a strategic, performance, and commercial opportunity. Participating sports worked collaboratively on shared challenges, including sustainable kit standards, supplier engagement, and approaches to reducing emissions across operations. The peer learning model enabled organisations to share knowledge and solutions, creating a more coordinated approach across UK high performance sport.
Across the programme, more than 150 participants from sustainability, performance, and operational roles were engaged, with representation spanning summer and winter sports and all four home nations. By 2025, all participating NGBs reported feeling equipped to take meaningful climate action. 80% viewed sustainability as a long term strategic priority, 81% recognised sustainability as a commercial opportunity rather than a cost, and 40% had introduced new sustainability policies as a direct result of the programme.
The initiative also helped strengthen sport’s collective voice on climate action. By bringing together 30 organisations under a shared framework, the Accelerator created a more unified approach to sustainability across the high-performance system and demonstrated the value of collaboration over individual action. Its impact has been recognised internationally, with the International Olympic Committee describing the programme as a “powerful example of system-wide collaboration”.
Through building knowledge, confidence, and practical capability across Olympic and Paralympic sport, the UK Sport Sustainability Accelerator has helped to advance sustainability into the culture and operations of high-performance sport. It showed how collective action could deliver meaningful environmental progress while strengthening sport’s ability to inspire change beyond the field of play.
BASIS Principles demonstrated: Energy and Emissions; Leadership and Governance; Collaboration; Innovation; Engagement and Education.