Becoming a Sustainability Champion
What does it mean to be a “green” champion in golf?
Green is a prominent color in April. Leaves have budded and are sporting vibrant light green everywhere you look. For golfers, many of us looked forward to watching a champion emerge from the field on Masters Sunday and pridefully don the green jacket. Environmentalists and corporates alike champion “green” practices or behaviors every year on Earth Day.
What it means to be “green” has been challenged in recent years, and rightfully so. Unsubstantiated, misleading, and sometimes just plain false sustainability claims have caused society to lose faith in companies’ purported sustainability efforts. While some companies are doing credible work to draw down their greenhouse gas emissions and reduce their environmental impact, others have pledged to decarbonize without taking any meaningful action, but instead deceitfully publicize their vain efforts to “go green.” Companies have started to understand that it’s increasingly less likely they can get away with cutting corners.
As the golf industry ramps up its sustainability efforts and starts to talk about them publicly, it must be aware of and avoid some of the pitfalls corporations have faced during their sustainability journeys. Earth Day and Earth Month provide a great opportunity for all industries to highlight how they’re tackling the collective action problem that is climate change; however, these efforts must be authentic and substantiated.
Golf has a responsibility to play its part in addressing climate change and communicating these actions as a sport that is played in nature and relies on nature to survive. Let’s face it, the golf industry still has a massive impact and quite a lot of work to do to pull its weight in the fight against climate change, but this shouldn’t prevent it from telling its success stories. Below are a few guiding principles that golf club managers and superintendents as well as others in the industry should consider when discussing their sustainability efforts:
Set goals and prioritize what’s important to stakeholders.
Sound and effective sustainability plans need to have goals - both short and long-term. While making changes here and there, such as installing some EV chargers in the parking lot, certainly helps a golf club feel like it’s doing something, it may distract from real progress over time if not folded into a sustainability plan. More ambitious goals, such as net-zero by 2050, should be accompanied by smaller, intermediate goals. This helps ensure the club is on track and kicks actions into motion more quickly than dancing around seemingly impossible goals that can be seen as a “later problem.” Furthermore, when short-term goals are met, the team working towards them feels a sense of success and achievement that keeps them motivated.
A common exercise in strategizing corporate sustainability is to conduct a materiality assessment. This evaluation helps companies determine which social and environmental issues are important or “material” to their business operations and helps the company prioritize them by incorporating stakeholders’ opinions. The same can and should be done at golf clubs. Managers should ask their board, members, and staff which issues are most pressing and take this into consideration when planning their sustainability efforts.
Be transparent about your goals and your progress towards them.
Once your goals are public, be prepared to report on them. Your audience will question the credibility of your sustainability plan and goals if they never see updates on the progress you’re making. Transparency is key to achieving support from both internal and external stakeholders on your sustainability journey.
Acknowledge shortcomings and plans to address them.
Like any industry, golf has an impact on the environment. Since golf is played in nature, its impact on nature can sometimes be glaring. Golf around the world has a bit of a social “black eye” because some golf courses do not respect or care for the environment in which they operate. Once concerned community members see the effects of those golf courses, distrust emerges between the golf club and its community. You need to address these issues, acknowledge any mismanagement or environmental wrongdoings, and most importantly, communicate plans to rectify the issues with the impacted communities.
Use data.
Always back up your sustainability claims using data. Greenwashing occurs when companies tout sustainability plans that are vague and lack specific goals and measurable progress towards these goals. If you’re just beginning your sustainability journey, start collecting all the data you already have available to you and plan ahead of what additional data you’ll need to collect in order to credibly show reductions in your club’s environmental footprint.
Get the word out.
If you’re honestly and credibly minimizing your impact on the environment and have ideas to share, talk about it! There’s so much value in posting about these achievements on LinkedIn, X, or your own blog because golf courses around the world are facing many of the same challenges. Leverage these platforms to garner the attention your golf club deserves and help other clubs improve their sustainability efforts. We also need our communities to know that we’re improving golf courses for them and we need non-golfers to be aware of all the great work certain golf courses are doing that usually isn’t communicated outside of the golf club.
