What we do

Here you find our areas of action, our concept and our topics.

sportainableAREAS

As a non-profit organisation, the think tank sportainable pursues exclusively purposes serving the common good. These purposes are

  • the promotion of science and research with regard to the sustainability goals of the United Nations,
  • the promotion of nature conservation and environmental protection,
  • the promotion of education for sustainable development in sport and
  • the promotion of a sustainable sports culture,

summarised in these three areas of action:

sportainableCONCEPT

We start from the connection between the systems sport, society and the natural environment world and examine the interactions at their interfaces. Sustainability is understood as ecological, social and economic, whereby we are primarily concerned with ecological and social sustainability in sport and understand this as a path of development.

The original of this graphic can be found in Kuhn (1996, p. 60). Kuhn developed it in 1992, at the very beginning of his studies on the ecological impact of everyday sport—as a pencil drawing. The systemic and hierarchical relationship between the dimensions of sustainability, as we later find in Raworth (2018) or Ibisch et al. (2019, pp. 59ff), is already laid out here. The model anticipates what we now call “strong sustainability”. In our research project "sportainable 'Doughnut'", we are working on a further development of this model.

The topics we deal with are derived from this.

sportainableTOPICS

Topics on the ecological level


These topics form the basis of our conceptual work.

Topics on the societal level


There is one fundamental topic here.

Topics on the condition and realisation level

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