The European Tour Group has unveiled the next chapter of its award-winning Green Drive sustainability strategy, with a revised plan that sets out the organisation's priorities for 2026-2030.
The updated strategy, which can be viewed here, was developed with help from the GEO Foundation for Sustainable Golf and is centred around four key impact priorities. These are:
• Nature: The protection, restoration and promotion of habitats and biodiversity. As part of this, the Tour has become the first golf Tour to become a signatory of the Sports for Nature Framework.
• Resources: Efficiency and circularity of water, energy and materials.
• Climate: Emissions reduction, adaption, and net zero transition.
• Communities: Supporting health and wellbeing in the communities the Tour visits around the world each season.
The strategy also includes a revised forward action plan, with accompanying targets, that support the achievement of these impact priorities by focusing on four implementation areas:
• Organisational Leadership: Delivering more deeply in activities we most directly control across operations, governance, procurement and HR.
• Responsible Championships: Staging and sanctioning ever more responsible and sustainable championships with a lower environmental footprint and higher value to nature and communities.
• Innovative Partnerships: Building purpose and innovation into international and regional partnerships, sponsorships and supplier agreements to drive wider multipliers across the golfing ecosystem.
• Wider Influence: Strengthening media and athlete engagement to generate greater reach and awareness across a global fan base.
Since the launch of the previous Green Drive strategy in 2021, the Tour has made meaningful progress in advancing sustainability and climate action, collecting numerous world firsts and multiple industry awards in the process. In 2022, the European Tour group become the only golf tour to commit to achieving net zero carbon by 2040 when it became a signatory to the UN Sports for Climate Action Framework.
Since then, the Tour has released an annual ‘scorecard’ that shows the full emissions breakdown for 10 tournaments and its headquarters. The latest scorecard showed scope one, two and three emissions at these 10 events reduced by 14%, emissions at the Tour’s Wentworth headquarters reduced by 18%, and there was an 18% decrease in player related travel emissions. Key innovations included rolling-out TV productions powered entirely by green hydrogen and launching sports’ first fan travel emissions calculating and offsetting platform. This strong body of work resulted in the European Tour group being awarded the Transformation Award at the prestigious Sport Positive Awards in 2024.
Speaking about the updated strategy for 2026-2030 Guy Kinnings, Chief Executive Officer of the European Tour group, said: “This is a plan that is designed to enable us to play an even greater part in addressing some of the defining environmental and social issues of our time and will contribute significantly to the future resilience and popularity of the Tour itself. We have made strong progress in areas such as operational emissions; procurement; governance; event staging and player and spectator engagement. We have also been able to identify the specifics of some of our largest ongoing challenges - most notably climate impacts related to travel. It is work that has laid the foundations for this exciting next phase, setting the direction and tempo for us to drive on further and continue to be an industry leader in tackling the climate emergency.”
Maria Grandinetti-Milton, Director of Sustainability at the European Tou group, added: “This updated and refreshed strategy provides the clear direction of travel for the next phase of our leadership in sustainability. It takes into account the changing landscape, both internally as the sport of golf continues to evolve, and externally as the regulatory landscape evolves. Just as importantly, this strategy is presented in light of ever more urgent environmental and social needs. These include the continued global decline of nature; the increasing frequency and intensity of climate extremes; and the well recognised connection between quality of environment and quality of life. Taken altogether, this sets sustainability as an even stronger pillar at the heart of our organisation.”
