A look back on Sustainable Golf Week 2024

As another Sustainable Golf Week has come and gone, the community that has grown up around sustainable golf — in Australia and Dubai, in the U.K and Canada, in the United States, Vietnam and Portugal — is back to the business of creating sustainable, inter-dependent relationships with local communities wherever the game is played. 

The courses, tournaments, associations, tours and players that comprise this diverse and sustainable partnership live and play the game in 75 different countries. Each in their own way, many marked Sustainable Golf Week 2024, Nov. 10-17, by checking in with the wider community at www.sustainable.golf, the online hub maintained by the GEO Sustainable Golf Foundation.

“Actually, these are the stories, questions and data the sustainable golf community shares 52 weeks a year.” said Jonathan Smith, founder and executive director of the Foundation. “But Sustainable Golf Week is a bit special. It’s a moment each year when many people take a step back, assess the work done, and take a moment to celebrate it before refocusing on next steps. Because sustainability is never done. A bit like the way golf is not a game of perfect.”

Based in North Berwick, along Scotland’s Golf Coast, the Foundation is an international non-profit founded in 2006 as a pioneer in what has become the sport and sustainability movement. GEO is dedicated to helping golf navigate sustainability, across the amateur and professional game, by helping to foster collaboration and inspire action. Case in point: Sustainable Golf Week.

The other 51 weeks of the year, the Foundation provides sustainability strategies, accessible industry-wide tools and programs, and credible certification. The Foundation also partners with national and regional golf associations, professional tours and tournaments, even professional players as individuals – all with a mind toward helping them each bring more people into the fold, to achieve more for golf, more quickly.

To get a sense for the diversity and scope of this global, sustainable golf community — and how it’s affecting local communities around the world — here is a sampling of recent happenings from either side of Sustainable Golf Week 2024.

• This year, Sustainable Golf Week was sandwiched between two major environmental events on the global calendar: the COP16 for Nature in Colombia, and the COP29 for Climate in Azerbaijan. Both highlighted critical planetary issues that are closely followed to help ensure golf’s solutions are well aligned.
• In Dubai, The European Tour Group — administrators of the DP World Tour, Challenge Tour, Legends Tour and G4D Tour — has launched a new awards program celebrating, “suppliers that have pioneered sustainable innovations and practices in their work supporting its golf tournaments.”
• In Australia, LIV Adelaide announced in November that the event had achieved GEO Certified status — the first Australian tournament operation to do so.
• Nearby, but still Down Under: Royal Queensland Golf Club has announced its own newly acquired GEO Certified standing, in the golf facility category, an achievement shared prior to the Australian PGA Championship contested there Nov. 21-24, 2024.
• In Western Canada, course superintendent Robin Sadler looks back on Mickelson National Golf Club’s first 12 months on the sustainable golf pathway. This facility, located outside Calgary, Alberta, was the first Canadian course operation to be recognized as GEO Certified.
• In the U.S., the PGA Tour is marching close to its commitment to get all of its TPC courses GEO Certified, as part of the Tour’s comprehensive sustainability strategy. The TPC Colorado was first over the line in spring 2024, with many more Tour properties hot on its heels. The signature PGA Tour Championship, held annually at East Lake GC in Atlanta, was GEO Certified in the events category last year.
• In Lisbon, at October’s International Golf Tourism Market Conference, IGTM announced its new partnership with GEO — to promote and enable sustainable golf tourism, a worthwhile but heavy lift. 

Elsewhere, the organizational trend toward sustainability education also continues apace, across the globe, with more and more conferences highlighting sustainable golf issues.

• Last week, the National Golf Course Owners Association Canada hosted 550 people in sessions that included sustainability panels and a plenary breakfast address from the Foundation’s Jonathan Smith.
• In Europe, the Swedish Greenkeepers Conference drew more than 300 superintendents, owners and club managers to Gothenburg, where GEO presented a keynote address. In Portugal, a dedicated workshop led by the European Golf Association at its annual meeting trained the spotlight on sustainability to an audience of 40 national governing bodies.
• The subject of sustainable course development and renovation also led the education programming at a recent gathering of Southeast Asian course owners at Hoiana Shores Golf Club, just south of Danang, Vietnam, where GEO Developments director Sam Thomas was a panelist. This event was organized by the Asian Club Managers Association and the Asian Golf Industry Foundation.
  

On the Tuesday, Nov. 12 of Sustainable Golf Week 2024, executive director Smith shared an impassioned call — in a variety of publications and websites — for golf to play a bigger, louder role in its own future and strive to become an even greater game, for a greater good:

In a world driven by sustainability, Smith wrote, which includes not only environmental stewardship but also ethical behavior and social equity, it is vital that golf conveys its commitments and value more strongly out to the world. 

And that message is not just about what we are already doing; it should aim further, putting more focus on recognizing the additional opportunities and how golf will work even harder for communities and nature in a broader range of ways. It can show ambition and innovation to do the maximum, not the minimum. 

A few important trends in the public, corporate and civic worlds where golf has a larger role to play — and, and needs to be seen playing it — include: 

• Low-carbon communities
• Nature-based solutions and ecosystem services
• Connecting people with nature restoration
• Further citizen science and STEM education for young people
• Partnering and collaborating with local social and environmental NGOs
• Broader charitable contributions
• Sustainable cities
• Cultural diversity and inclusion 

This is when, in terms of golf and communities, the sport begins to play to its potential.