Mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions (LORENZONII_U26ENVCAST)

This studentship aims to explore how group/social identities (e.g. sports fans) can be leveraged to encourage low-carbon, climate-resilient behaviours examining how cultural activities such as sport can support climate awareness and action. This project will adopt a place-based approach. Through collaboration with grassroots organisations and/or professional clubs, it will co-design and pilot interventions that embed synergistic adaptation-mitigation behaviours into sports club routines.

It will examine how to foster adoption of sustainable practices that align with sport/wellbeing motivations, make climate action visible and socially rewarding, and address the ‘climate silence’ (Wise et al., 2025) identified amongst sports communities. This studentship is affiliated with the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST). CAST is headquartered at the University of Bath and is an international centre of excellence founded in 2019.

It has just commenced a second phase of work (2024-29). UEA is one of the CAST partners. In the 2021 REF, UEA was ranked 20th in the UK for research quality and impact.