It was four years ago during the Covid lockdown that Pat Cummins found himself with some time on his hands and started to join the dots between some of what he had experienced on the cricket field and the climate crisis. The time he lost six kilos in a day, the days he found it hard to breathe.
He thought about it more when he became captain and started to make decisions based on whether he wanted his team to be starting or finishing in the shade. And more when his first son, Albie, was born. He came up with a practical plan: that he would help put solar panels on his local cricket club Penrith, a blue-collar area in the western suburbs of Sydney that becomes very hot in the heart of the summer. He found some companies that would provide solar and paid for the installation himself. And so, alongside some other Australian cricketers, the idea for Cricket for Climate was born.
It has been, from the start, a player-led movement, with cricketers contributing financially to the installation of solar panels at their junior and grade clubs – Josh Hazlewood at Tamworth CC, Moises Henriques at St George DCC, Rachael Haynes and Alyssa Healy at Sydney CC, and Nathan Lyon at Northern District CC. And then, in a major partnership with Cricket Australia, 285kW of solar panels were installed at the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane.
The idea was simple: solar would reduce carbon emissions, enable clubs to use the money saved in energy bills to further the future of the game – to invest in nets or buy new equipment and, lastly, help cricket lovers to start a conversation about climate and energy transition.
They held a summit, inviting the federal minister for climate change and energy, Cricket Australia, movers and shakers. And because it was Cummins and because it was cricket, people came.
Joanne Bowen is the company’s chief executive and originally from the UK. “It’s quite phenomenal how embedded cricket is within the community [in Australia],” she says. “It’s exciting, we’ve got eight million cricket fans, the prime minister, a bunch of politicians, CEOs, other sports we can influence because our venues are also football clubs, councils, plus all the general public. The power of that is phenomenal.”
Cricket for Climate has run academy sessions, talking about the links between extreme weather and cricket, how individuals can take action for themselves and how to build resilience for the community game. Attendees have included Alex Carey, Ashton Agar, David Moody and the under-19s Kane Halfpenny, Louis Smith, Olivia Maxwell, Eva Ragg and Beth Worthley. The very young and also those looking towards the end of their careers, thinking about their children’s futures. The idea is that they, too, will feel able to speak out as Cummins has done – not without risk to his own personal standing.
Now the scope of Cricket for Climate’s plans have changed, success has brought impatience to do more. Bowen, one woman rotating an increasing number of hats, explains: “Rather than one club at a time, we want to do things at scale.
“We have the big four banks wanting to partner with us to do multiple clubs, to push further than solar, to make mini green power stations that generate so much power that it goes back into the grid to help stabilise it as the country transitions away from coal. We’ve got bigger announcements in the next few months too, really ambitious projects.”
The number of people prepared to listen is increasing as players and parents start voting with their feet. “We’re starting to see clubs in far northern Queensland say: ‘Our participation rate is dropping off, kids aren’t training, they are starting to choose less risky sports like basketball, which you can play inside.’ Who wants to pay 500 bucks for a season if it constantly gets interrupted?”
Outside Australia, things have been moving as well. There was a good showing at Gloucestershire’s Nevil Road ground last Thursday night for the Greener Games Sustainability Conference, organised by a coalition of the club, the Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership, and the Next Test climate and cricket group (of which – full disclosure – I am a member).
Prof Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol, a marine biologist, who has also worked on the Blue Planet series, spoke about the power of “active hope”. Asif Rehmanwala – the chief executive of Ecotricity, a board member at GCCC and the vice-chair of Forest Green Rovers – explained how “the world’s greenest football club” has grown and stretched, and how cricket could do more.
A group of more than a hundred professional women’s footballers this week published an open letter to Fifa calling for the sport’s global governing body to drop the Saudi oil company Aramco – the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter – as a sponsor on both environmental and humanitarian grounds. The International Cricket Council, which last year signed a renewal of its own agreement with Aramco, has not yet experienced such a public pushback from players, though many were known to be unhappy about having to be interviewed in front of Aramco billboards and be presented with the Aramco player of the match award.
The ICC did, however, ask Cricket for Climate to present at its conference in autumn. Bowen worried that she would be heckled off stage – but she was welcomed. The mood, slowly, thankfully, is changing; the problem is cricket doesn’t have time for creeping evolution any more.
This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
