Fair, Green & Active: Tackling inequalities through environmental sustainability in sport and physical activity
Sport and physical activity depend on healthy people, healthy places and a stable climate – but access to these foundations are not equal.
Many people face persistent barriers to being active. Cost, disability, health, discrimination, caring responsibilities, transport, safety, confidence and lack of opportunity can all affect whether someone is able to take part. These barriers often overlap and reinforce one another.
Environmental conditions create another layer of inequality.
- Some communities have fewer safe and welcoming
places to be active. - Some experience poorer air quality, greater flood risk, more
extreme heat and less access to nature. - Some depend on community facilities that are under severe pressure from energy costs and ageing infrastructure.
- Some cannot reach activities without an expensive or difficult journey.
These are both environmental issues and participation issues.
At the same time, environmental action can create practical solutions. It can protect community facilities, reduce running costs, improve parks and neighbourhoods, make journeys safer, lower the cost of kit, build resilience to extreme weather and create healthier places in which to live and move.
This guide tried to bring those threads together.
The central point is simple:
Environmental sustainability, designed around fairness and community need, can help remove barriers to physical activity and deliver the greatest benefits to the people and places facing the greatest disadvantage.