As professional athletes, September brought our biggest moments of 2025 – the culmination of endless work and planning, a huge amount of sweat, and even occasional tears.

For Rhydian, it was competing for Australia at the World Athletics Championships in Japan. For Nicola, recovering from a season-ending injury to play her first AFLW game in a St Kilda guernsey.

As we laced up, Australia’s climate science community was preparing for a very different big event: The first National Climate Risk Assessment.

The milestone report lays out our most significant risks and highlights our most urgent priorities.

It’s a remarkable piece of work by the Australian Climate Service. But one omission jumped out, and it’s one we’ve discussed since.

Sport barely rates a mention.

On one level, that’s understandable. Sport is just games, after all.

But Australians know it’s so much more.

Fourteen million of us play sport. Last year, eight of Australia’s 10 most-watched TV programs were sporting events. Even if you haven’t heard these stats, they won’t come as a surprise. Sport is our national language, and a critical part of our country’s infrastructure.

The CRA was released in a week when it was impossible to ignore the impact of climate change on sport. This was particularly true if you were a competitor at the World Athletics Championships, held as heatwaves broke all previous temperature records in Japan.

As his organisation scrambled to reschedule endurance races that week, World Athletics Federation president Sebastian Coe talked in clear, direct language about the challenge of climate change.

Just this week, Novak Djokovic collapsed and other tennis players wilted in high temperatures and soaring humidity at the Shanghai Masters.

Of course, these disruptions aren’t confined to the other side of the world. At home, the most recent AFL season faced extreme weather impacts in every state – from a cyclone cancelling the men’s first games, to heat protocols enacted as late as round five.

It’s a shame these impacts are absent from the CRA – but it’s also a huge opportunity.

Hard numbers might tell us how many Australians play sport, and how much it benefits our economy. But the deeper value is cultural. Sport is where we spend our weekends, build communities, find relief in mental health struggles, and find physical health in the face of sedentary lifestyles.

Applying the lens of the CRA’s priority climate hazards, sport is everywhere.

Take air quality. Bushfire smoke forced the suspension of a Big Bash League match in 2019, and affected countless more at the grassroots level.

Take floods and storms. This year, on the east coast, everyone involved in community sport became all too familiar with endless texts announcing weather-caused cancellations. The CRA talks about property risks from inundation and flooding; and the same holds true for our local ovals and clubhouses.

Take heat. The CRA projects the number of extreme hot days could double or quadruple, reminding us of the 2014 Australian Open, when nine players had to withdraw and more than 1000 spectators and ball-kids were treated for heat stress.

In 2018, England Test captain Joe Root was hospitalised after collapsing in 42-degree Sydney heat. And this year a community cricketer, Junaid Zafar Khan, tragically lost his life playing on a 41-degree day in Adelaide.

Joe Root in the heat in Sydney in 2018 – he was later hospitalised. Photo: AAP

While sport might not have been singled out, the CRA does specify climate’s impact on wellbeing, warning the “mental and physical wellbeing of communities will continue to deteriorate due to climate impacts, especially among those already disadvantaged”.

This is where sport lives – where its benefits to Australia’s collective wellbeing cannot be understated.

If playing sport becomes harder, more expensive, and happens on degraded facilities, then of course we’ll have to expect lower participation and worse health outcomes.

Explicitly recognising sport in future assessments – or creating a special report dedicated to the climate impacts on sport – would give us powerful data to work from.

It would show us the real cost of competition lost to heat, smoke, washouts; the true adaptation needs of sporting facilities; and the community health impacts of declining participation.

Simply put, we’d have the information needed to treat sport like the essential community infrastructure it is, especially for rural and regional Australia.

The effort needed to shift the dial on climate change is not lost on us. But urgency in mitigation and adaptation becomes easier to support when the stakes are visible in our everyday lives.

For so many Australians, nothing is more everyday than sport.
People protect what they love. Australians LOVE sport.

Sport carries cultural weight unmatched by any other institution. Remedying its absence from our national climate risk assessment is a huge opportunity to rally Australians around climate action – adaptation, mitigation and global leadership.

The numbers in a Climate Risk Assessment aren’t just temperatures and projections. They’re lost Saturday mornings, flooded fields and missed opportunities to play, find joy and connect.

The next risk assessment, or better yet, a dedicated report, should recognise sport as the cultural, health and economic pillar it is.

Rhydian Cowley is an Australian racewalker, BBC Green Sport’s world athlete of the year, and an Olympic medallist; Nicola Barr is a former No.1 draft pick for the GWS Giants, and plays for St Kilda in the AFLW