Sustainability: Climate Risk and Racing’s Social Licence, Why Getting This Right Matters

The climate change debate often positions sport as a contributor to the problem, a significant source of transport emissions, energy consumption and resource use. But sport is also, in a more fundamental sense, a victim of climate change. The sporting calendar is built around seasonal patterns of weather and ground conditions. When those patterns change, when winters are wetter, summers drier, storms more frequent and extremes more extreme, sport is among the first commercial sectors to feel the operational consequences.

Horse racing’s relationship with climate change is both causal and consequential. The industry contributes to greenhouse gas emissions through its operations. It is also materially affected by the changing climate that those emissions are driving. Understanding both dimensions is essential to understanding why British racing’s commitment to environmental sustainability is not simply an ethical gesture but an operational imperative.

How Climate Change Is Already Affecting British Racing

Flood-related abandonments: The 2025 – 26 National Hunt season has already demonstrated the scale of disruption that wet weather can cause. Multiple meetings were abandoned or ran under inspection in the early months of 2026, and the 223mm of rainfall recorded at Cheltenham in the first weeks of the year was historically exceptional. While individual weather events cannot be attributed directly to climate change, the pattern of more frequent and severe wet events in UK winters is consistent with climate projections.

The financial consequences of abandoned meetings are significant: lost prize money distribution, lost betting revenue, lost hospitality and ticket income, wasted trainer and owner costs associated with race preparation. A racecourse that runs fewer fixtures than planned recovers less of its fixed operating costs, reducing the financial headroom for infrastructure investment including sustainability initiatives.

Drought and irrigation pressure: The other side of the UK’s increasingly volatile climate is summer drought. Several British racecourses have experienced periods in recent years where turf quality threatened the viability of fixtures without emergency irrigation, placing pressure on water resources and creating costs not budgeted in standard operating plans.

Katie Carr, BHA Head of Environmental Sustainability, cited this directly: “Weather related disruptions have become more frequent and severe, with flooding and drought impacting fixtures and water availability. We face a broad range of environmental risks, which could have a real impact on business operations, horse welfare and supply chain security.”

Heat stress for horses: Research published through the PMC identified heat as a welfare concern for thoroughbreds: “The transport of Thoroughbreds for breeding and racing is not only affected by the environment but also has deleterious impacts… In July 2009, the first abandonment of a race meeting in the United Kingdom due to heat occurred at Worcester, ‘with the track running out of water, one horse collapsing, and other horses arriving at the track dehydrated’.” As average UK summer temperatures increase, heat management for horses in transit and at racecourses will require progressively more active management.

The Social Licence Dimension

Beyond operational risk, British racing faces a social licence challenge. “Social licence to operate”, the informal permission granted by the public and by political institutions for an industry to continue operating, is increasingly contingent on demonstrable environmental responsibility in a way it was not a generation ago.

Racing is a sport that depends on government for its regulatory framework, on betting operators for a substantial portion of its revenue, on public broadcasting for free-to-air coverage, and on a betting public that includes tens of millions of people who would consider themselves environmentally conscious. All of these stakeholder groups are increasingly likely to ask whether the industry they support, or are asked to legislate for, broadcast, or regulate, is taking its environmental obligations seriously.

LawInSport’s analysis of horseracing sustainability noted that “Action on promoting environmental sustainability is in short supply but the legislative and regulatory dam may now be about to burst”, a reference to the growing body of UK environmental legislation and the EU taxonomy framework that increasingly requires organisations to report on and account for their environmental impact.

Racing’s voluntary strategy, Racing Resilient, positions the industry to engage proactively with this legislative environment rather than reactively.

The Greenwashing Risk

Any industry moving toward environmental sustainability commitments faces the risk of greenwashing, presenting an environmentally responsible image without the substance to back it up. The PMC’s academic analysis of thoroughbred racing sustainability explicitly identified this risk: “The central challenge for the Thoroughbred breeding and racing industry will be to undertake genuine sustainability actions and avoid accusations of ‘greenwashing’, i.e., where a corporation portrays itself as more environmentally minded than its actions warrant.”

The credibility of Racing Resilient depends on measurable, auditable progress, particularly the establishment of a credible carbon baseline against which future reduction can be measured. A strategy that sets goals without baselines, or that identifies initiatives without monitoring them, provides the appearance of commitment without its substance.

The Racing Foundation’s involvement, as a grant-making body with accountability for how charitable funds are deployed, provides an external accountability mechanism that purely internal industry strategies lack. This is a structural strength of British racing’s approach compared to self-certified environmental claims in other sectors.

What Successful Sustainability Looks Like

British racing’s sustainability journey is at an early stage. The Racing Resilient strategy is a five-year framework; the hard work of establishing baselines, implementing specific projects and measuring outcomes is ongoing. Success, defined as meaningful verifiable progress against the strategy’s four priority areas, would look like:

– A published, audited carbon footprint for British racing as a whole, updated annually
– A declining trend in carbon intensity per fixture over the strategy period
– Increased biodiversity metrics on racing land (species counts, habitat condition surveys) showing improvement
– Reduced water consumption per fixture relative to the baseline
– A reducing proportion of waste sent to landfill

None of these are easy to achieve. They require coordination across hundreds of individual businesses, training yards, studs, racecourses, feed suppliers, transport operators, that the BHA and Racing Foundation cannot directly control. What the strategy can do is provide the framework, the incentives and the industry-wide credibility that makes individual decisions to act in the right direction commercially and reputationally rational.