Most sustainability strategies share a structural problem: the commitments are made at the top, but the accountability tends to stop somewhere before it reaches the people actually running operations. World Athletics spent the first five years of its 2020-2030 strategy trying to solve that problem, and its 2026 Sustainability Report and Strategy Review is an honest account of what that effort produced. The headline finding is not a new emissions target or a reaffirmed carbon neutrality commitment. It is that the Athletics for a Better World Standard (ABW), a scored framework covering ESG performance, was incorporated as a contractual deliverable in select World Athletics Series events in 2026. Hosting a World Athletics event now means meeting the standard, not just endorsing it.
What the ABW Standard Measures and How Glasgow 2024 Showed It Could Work
The ABW Standard was developed through a two-year pilot beginning in 2022 and was built around six pillars: diversity and wellbeing, leadership in sustainability, sustainable production and consumption, climate change and carbon, local environment and air quality, and global equality. Events are scored against these pillars, with Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze recognition tiers. The World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow in 2024 was the first event to reach Platinum, scoring 108 out of 120 points.
What made Glasgow instructive was not just the score. The championships demonstrated that a scored standard can drive operational decisions rather than just document them after the fact. Zero-emission-capable vehicles handled transport logistics. Recyclable water packaging replaced single-use plastic throughout the venue. A zero-food-waste program redistributed more than 1,000 meals to local food banks. Fifty percent of catered meals were vegetarian or vegan, reducing the catering footprint by 2.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). None of those outcomes were incidental. They were the result of procurement and planning decisions made weeks and months before the event opened.
What the Five-Year Record Shows About Moving From Commitment to Contract
The five-year timeline in the report makes the progression visible. In 2020, World Athletics launched the strategy. In 2021, it signed the United Nations Sport for Climate Action Framework. In 2022, the ABW Standard entered its pilot phase and real operational data started accumulating: 13,200 kilograms of waste diverted from landfill at the Oregon championships, 325,000 single-use plastic bottles avoided through water refill stations. By 2023, the organization had achieved International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 20121 certification for its sustainable event management system. By 2026, it had recertified to the updated ISO 20121:2024 standard and embedded ABW compliance into hosting contracts. That is six years from launch to contract requirement, which is faster than most large organizations move on comparable transitions.
At Tokyo 2025, biofuels powered 100% of the temporary generators used by broadcasters, avoiding 160 tonnes of CO2e. By the end of 2025, 123 events across 36 countries were reporting sustainability progress against the ABW Standard, up from 102 events the prior year. The report notes that the next phase of the strategy will focus on consistency, scale, and impact rather than new commitments, which is a notable posture for an organization still five years from its 2030 endpoint.
What Procurement and Sustainability Teams Can Take From the ABW Model
For organizations outside the sports industry, the ABW Standard's trajectory is more useful as a model than as a benchmark. The mechanism that made it work was not the standard itself but the decision to make it a contractual condition. Sustainability frameworks that exist as voluntary guidance tend to produce voluntary compliance. Once performance against a framework becomes a requirement for accessing a contract, market, or license, the behavior of suppliers and partners changes. World Athletics' experience over five years suggests that the path from commitment to contract is achievable, but it requires a measurement system rigorous enough to withstand scrutiny, enough event data to establish what good performance actually looks like, and enough organizational will to make compliance non-negotiable. The last part is usually where the process stalls, and where the report's honest account of what it took is most instructive for anyone trying to replicate it.
