The 2024 Sustainable Golf Week is underway.
Over the last 3 years Sustainable Golf Week has helped bring people and organisations across golf together to explore key issues, celebrate leadership and inspire one another to do even more for communities and the environment.
The last two sustainable golf weeks focused on two fundamentals for sustainable golf:
Fostering Nature: How golf protects, restores and helps promote the importance of nature
Tackling Climate: How and where golf contributes to greenhouse gas emissions through the consumption of energy, water, material and natural resources; how it plays a part in storing carbon; and how it is adapting.
This year the focus is on the third critical pillar, how golf plays a part in strengthening communities.
Shared Value: Who benefits from Golf?
Clearly, the 80 million golfers around the world benefit from golf.
They get lifelong, intergenerational physical and emotional health benefits. They relish the sometimes serious, but more often friendly competition that the game offers, with its level playing field that allows people of different abilities to compete fairly.
They can stay active for longer, spending significant spells of fun, sociable time in nature. Studies have shown that golfers live longer, and participation should be considered preventative treatment, helping take pressure off health services.
Beyond that?
Many people work in the sector, even if they don’t play.
There is a wealth of skilled and diverse career opportunities within a large, multifaceted sector.
Golf is an important employer and a source of inward investment for many communities and regions, particularly in rural areas.
Club managers, course managers, club professionals, marketers, equipment and merchandise manufacturers and distributors, tournament teams, media, tour operators, course designers, builders and many more are directly employed in the golf industry.
Indirectly, golf also supports a vast supply chain of materials and services, including food, technology, machinery, equipment, textiles, aggregates, and more. There are also golf fans, whose lives are enriched as spectators, local community members who benefit from access to recreational spaces and local community groups that collaborate with golf clubs and benefit from charity fundraisers and other forms of support.
And beyond that, perhaps less obviously, local communities also benefit tangibly from the wider ecosystem services provided by golf greenspaces, including air cooling, shelter and shade, air purification, noise abatement, flood alleviation in watersheds, plus many other physiological benefits of being near nature.
Find out more about sustainable golf week at https://sustainable.golf/sustainable-golf-week-2024/
The EGA's Renewed Sustainability Drive
Building on a longstanding involvement in environmental sustainability, and more recent efforts in 2022 and 2023 focused on pesticide regulation emerging from the European Commission, the European Golf Association embarked on a renewed and strengthened sustainability drive earlier this year.
With 50 member associations, the EGA will look to leverage its unique position in European golf to help align outlook, commitments and pathways from different golf authorities across the continent and help ensure knowledge is appropriately developed and used effectively.
The EGA’s role in sustainability going forwards will be focused on three key action areas; coordinate, develop and advocate.
To effectively address this mission, the EGA has set up a new collaborative structure which involves the participation of experts across Europe.
Read more about the EGA's renewed sustainability drive here: https://www.ega-golf.ch/content/ega-embarks-renewed-sustainability-drive
