The British & Irish Lions

Challenge:

Business-related travel, particularly air travel activities and expenses, hotel accommodation, and taxi services, represented a significant carbon footprint for the Head Office Operations.

Challenge:

International rugby tours represent a significant emission footprint, particularly when fan travel is included in the scope of assessment. For the British & Irish Lions 2025 Australia tour, fan travel emissions represent over 90% of the total tour footprint. Understanding the scale and source of this footprint was essential to planning sustainable fan engagement and achieving climate goals.

Challenge:

Outside of major tour years, the British & Irish Lions' head office operations continue to generate a measurable carbon footprint across core areas such as travel, procurement, and digital services. However, identifying and addressing opportunities to embed sustainability into everyday business practices remains a challenge. Establishing reliable baselines and improving data collection is therefore critical to driving emissions reductions across the organisation's Standard Business Operations (SBO).

Challenge:

The voluntary carbon market is increasingly scrutinised for quality, transparency, and real-world impact. Despite this, high-integrity carbon credits remain one of the most effective channels to finance climate action in regions most vulnerable to environmental degradation. For the Lions, committing to a full-cycle offset strategy meant navigating these reputational risks with verified projects with quantifiable co-benefits. This required early procurement, deep due diligence, and a portfolio approach that balanced environmental permanence with social impact.

Challenge:

Fan travel accounted for over 90% of the Lions 2025 emissions footprint. Traditionally overlooked or left to individual discretion, this emissions source lacked both structured offset pathways and meaningful fan engagement.

The Lions have tackled fan travel emissions challenge at scale. The challenge wasn't just technical - coordinating multiple stakeholders and travel patterns - but cultural: making environmental action meaningful to passionate fans whose priority is supporting their team.

Challenge:

Securing partner contributions toward sustainability and impact efforts within the sponsorship framework proved challenging. While direct financial support was not achieved during this cycle, the process uncovered a clear appetite for structured, values-aligned engagement in future tours.

Challenge:

International tours place unavoidable demands on teams to travel across geographies, often requiring air travel, temporary accommodation, and in-country equipment purchases. For the 2025 Tour, these realities were heightened by Australia’s size, forcing localised procurement of equipment and logistics support at each match location. The lack of a historical baseline and the scale of domestic movement made emissions forecasting difficult. Despite these limitations, the Lions committed to developing a complete emissions profile for all core activities, though some data is still pending final post-tour collection.

Challenge:

Office energy use contributes to Scope 2 emissions, indirect emissions that come from the electricity an organisation purchases to power its operations. While relatively low in volume compared to other emission sources, Scope 2 emissions are highly visible and often among the easiest to address. By choosing a renewable energy supplier, Airtricity for the Lions' head office, these emissions can effectively be reduced to zero, making them a straightforward and impactful opportunity for decarbonisation.

Challenge:

Fans often lack the ability to support Impact initiatives. Tools like Everclime's Impact Cards aim to bridge this gap, acting as both a mechanism for fans to contribute to verified projects and a platform for sharing trusted information about the outcomes achieved. By giving fans a way to engage directly and see the results of their support, we unlock a more participatory and informed impact experience.