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ECB's Environmental Sustainability Plan for Cricket

The ECB’s Environmental Sustainability Plan for Cricket maps out the next steps that we need to take in collaboration with the cricket network, our suppliers and partners to make our game more sustainable.

The ECB has invested more than £10million into tackling climate change for more than two decades, but we know we need to do more if we are to ensure that flooding, drought, pollution and extreme heat don’t stop play.

The ESP focuses on ensuring the ECB provides the leadership and support to inspire everyone in cricket – from grassroots clubs to our suppliers - to achieve our shared sustainability ambitions.

To help drive that goal the ECB has become the first cricket National Governing Body to sign up to the commitments of the UN Sport for Climate Action framework, which provides science-based targets for all of society.

Our most focussed target under the UN Sport for Climate Action framework is to reduce our emissions by half by 2030 (with a baseline year of 2022).

READ: ECB's Environmental Sustainability Plan for Cricket

We have already been making progress on this ambition, from simple changes such as our England teams eliminating single-use plastics at our home internationals to more complex conversation with our Travel Management Company about how we can make efficiencies in the ways we travel.

We are making this commitment because, as we grow our game to more people, we must do so in a sustainable way that allows future generations to be able to participate and enjoy cricket in the same way we do now.

The clearest path to doing that is by uniting cricket and its partners behind this shared ambition – to reduce our emissions and be more sustainable.

Every part of the game has a role to play, no matter how big or small.

We are making a running start thanks to the weight of action our game has already taken over the past two decades and the many innovations already in place across the cricket network.

Those range from the award-winning sustainability initiatives across our venues - highlighted by Edgbaston’s Go Green Game when England Men hosted New Zealand in September - to the ECB working on sustainability supply chains for our All Stars and Dynamos programmes, including a recycling project for cricket bats.

In the recreation game our clubs continue to make use of the ECB’s £4million County Grants fund – with a key theme of Tackling Climate Change – which amongst many other schemes saw 37 solar projects undertaken amongst affiliated clubs in 2022. In 2023 the number of grants committed has risen to 64 for solar projects.

The ECB will continue to invest in sustainability initiatives such as this within the cricket network because it is the right thing to do and because it will benefit our cricket community in England and Wales for years and decades to come.

BLOG: ECB Sustainability Manager Kathy Gibbs introduces the Environmental Sustainability Plan for Cricket

We have also begun work with our key suppliers to measure our emissions so that we can understand where we can make the needed changes.

Over the next 12 months we will develop a Carbon Reduction Plan, one of the core commitments of the UN Sport for Climate Action Framework, alongside reporting on the progress we make on our emission reductions.

We will use this time to have pragmatic discussions with our partners and suppliers and identify what areas we could cut emissions and work together to support and inspire sustainable actions across the game.

We will also continue to work with our first-class venues and recreational clubs where there are different levels of resource and maturity around their sustainability plans.

The purpose of the ESP is to work within those means and to provide the appropriate support that allows anyone in the game to reach their sustainable goals. It will also help ensure recreational clubs are more resilient to extreme weather events such as flooding.

We will empower our ECB employees through training programmes and we will continue to look make the ECB’s operations more sustainable with projects such as our Green Fleet, which has seen us transitioning to ULEV company cars since 2021.

Cricket is more susceptible to climate change than many sports and while we don’t have all the answers, the ESP ensures sustainability is a key part of the ECB’s strategy and that we have a plan that invests in cricket and allows the game to unite behind collective action that will protect the future of the game.