Outdoors, indoors: A perspective on sports and climate change

In an effort to deal with air quality issues exacerbated by climate change, China is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in domed public spaces. Are outdoor sports doomed for extinction?

In 2018, Indonesia experienced what came to be known in the surf world as Big Wednesday – for three days, the Archipelago experienced its heaviest swells ever recorded, sparking a global rush from the world’s greatest big-wave surfers to get to Bali and experience conditions normally reserved for the likes of Waimea Bay.

According to Matt George of surfing resource website Magic Seaweed, “20ft waves looking like Cloudbreak were detonating where waves had never broken before,” while Chilean big-wave surfer Rafael Tapia — himself a Nazáre hall-of-famer — said of his journey to the outside that day: “The boat captain says [sic] in his 32 years, he’d never seen the channel between the islands closing out.”

Stories such as these are becoming all-too-familiar in the world of surfing, though unsurprising when seeing how wave data has been trending over the last 41 years, says The Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.

A study carried out over a 41-year period found that global wave height and set frequency — especially in the more densely populated and economically deprived southern hemisphere — has seen a notable increase and looks set to continue rising over the next century. This heralds a new dawn for big-wave riders, though potentially triggering a multitude of problems for the global south’s economic development and sustainability.

It doesn’t end there: Snowpack cover across the world’s ski resorts has also been affected by rising land temperatures, affecting both ski tourism and professional winter sports. When the 2014 Winter Olympics opened in Sochi, there were complaints from a majority of athletes — with US veteran Shaun White even refusing to compete in the Slopestyle contest — about the dangers presented by the melting snow, prompting organizers to dip into snow reserves and improve the conditions.

The University of Waterloo, Ontario conducted a study and found that if the trend in global warming continues on its current trajectory, only eight out of the 21 cities to have hosted the Winter Olympics in the past would be geographically viable by the end of this century. It seems the Olympic map may need to be redrawn as we chase the ideal winter conditions into potentially more remote and snow-friendlier corners of our world.

The question of how global sport adapts to the changing environment is one that Madeleine Orr at the University of Loughborough, UK has been asking for some time. Along with a group of climate and sports academics, she conducted a review of the impact climate change has been having on what she calls ‘climate-exposed’ sports like football, soccer, track-and-field or any open-air pursuits. Orr et al. concluded that climate change, namely in hazards such as extreme heat, presents a threat not only to athletes in climate-exposed sports but to spectators too.

The threat of climate-exposed sports was given emphasis in May 2021 when 21 runners lost their lives after exposure to extreme weather conditions at a 100k elevated ultramarathon in China’s Yellow River Stone Forest National Park. The victims died from exposure to bitterly cold wind, rain and hail storms, suffering hypothermia and exposure, with reports of athletes being forced to turn back down the trail and some even passing out on the side of the track as they succumbed to the conditions.

In the near future, climate change may render outdoor sports impossibly dangerous

In China, extreme environmental conditions are no new phenomenon; this is never more apparent than in how Chinese schools have been adapting to air pollution. It is common for schools to have an air quality index (AQI) threshold for allowing outdoor activities in China, especially in heavily industrialized cities such as Beijing, Xi’an, and Qingdao.

In many cities, schools have what are known as ‘red days’, where any spike in AQI above a certain level per cubic meter signals a move to indoor play or physical education. In cities like Beijing which have a daily average AQI of 300, school can be canceled outright.

This presents a moral question about children’s well-being, not to mention their sporting development. Larger cities in China can prove a difficult place for most children to gain access to open spaces, such are the population density and urbanized sprawl.

One way in which schools are tackling the issue of air pollution and extreme temperature is the use of air domes for outdoor sports. At first, when considering the dystopian imagery involved in children being forced to carry out sports under a PVC sphere, one might be forgiven for feeling pessimistic or skeptical, though there is positivity to be found.

When in a 2016 CGTN interview they were first asked about their thoughts on having outdoor sports or recess in an indoor setting, school children in Beijing’s Huijia Private School were upbeat.

“Because it’s more polluted outside, and in here it is very, sort of, fresh,” said one student when quizzed on the new dome. The reviews continued in this vein with another student stating, “(Before the dome was here) I felt very sad: kind of sick because I —,” her last remark was followed by a betraying cough. Another student smiled, “It can really help us to not get super sick.”

The world’s leading air dome manufacturer is Broadwell Air Domes. CFO Cam Cameron started out playing soccer for the University of Michigan, spending much of his younger days yearning for suitable indoor sporting locations in the brazen wintery conditions of the Great Lakes. He identified a problem in the lack of access to sports for many young people like him in the region: this sparked a natural connection to the air dome project later in life.

“There’s been a huge benefit for all the schools involved,” Cam told FanSided. “Another major factor is the price. With the rocketing costs in production and building materials since the pandemic, more and more interest is growing.”

So, how quickly has this demand for indoor sporting facilities risen? Broadwell was the first company to put up a clear sports dome, starting with the International School of Beijing in 2014, attaching the dome to the school itself, before modifying their designs for future projects. They have since worked with dozens of other institutions, and what was once an exclusively private domain is now accessible to state schools and public universities across the land.

China’s General Administration of Sport announced this year a plan to invest $331 million in building 185 sporting venues for public use, and Broadwell, which has found a niche market and a solution to a problem for many industrialized parts of the world, will look to capitalize on this news.

“Now, we are in more and more smaller, state schools that can afford sports facilities for their students,” says Cam with genuine enthusiasm. He goes on to mention how a recent quote for an Amazon warehouse-sized proposal was less than 10 percent of the bricks-and-mortar estimate given by a construction company.

Financial benefits like these will be hard to ignore with an increasingly tenuous future global economy needing to deal with the fallout of the pandemic, wars, rampant inflation and volatile supply chains. The period from January 2020 to now has been fraught with difficulty for most of the planet, the effects of which are set to be felt for many years to come.

It all looked so much better only a decade ago, with China being praised for its announcement of the 14th Five-Year-Plan, in which carbon emissions were to peak in 2030 before disappearing altogether by 2060. This also came with the news that lignite — also known as brown coal and with an ash content of over thirty percent — would be banned from entering the market from January 2015.

However, fast forward to April 2022 and the outlook is not so bright. Xinhua News reports that China has halted tariffs on imports of all coal products, including coking coal, anthracite and yes, lignite.

With the war in Ukraine and the sanctions on the exports of Russian energy hitting its economy, there can be no doubt the rush to secure cheaper shipments of low-cost brown coal with high ash content will be considerable.

This means that for China’s inner-city children, there may be dark skies ahead in the race against air pollution, though at least for now they will be able to watch them from the safety of clean-air sports domes. One can only hope that these same clean-air domes are something the children of 2030 onwards will be able to finally leave behind.

Until then, outdoor sports will continue to be an area of concern in China and the rest of the world. It is clear that if we want to keep outdoor sports safe, measures will need to be taken, investments in new climate adaptations will be crucial and our approach to outdoor sports will have to be modified as we navigate the environmental wilderness ahead.