Leadership in sustainability (© Christel Saneh)
The World Athletics Sustainable Event Management System (SEMS), a best practice guidance for event organisers, is now available in 12 languages.
The SEMS, which provides detailed guidance to 15 key areas of event planning and delivery, was introduced to World Athletics licensed one-day meetings, tour events and organising committees of upcoming World Athletics Series in November 2021, alongside the Athletics for a Better World Standard, a certification that measures and scores an event’s achievement in sustainable delivery.
The guidance, which can be downloaded from the Information Hub section of the Sustainability home page, is now available in English, French and Spanish, the official World Athletics languages, as well as Arabic, Bengali, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese and Russian. [Update March 2023: The guidance is now also available in Swahili, marking its 13th language.]
The Athletics for a Better World Standard will be tiered, with platinum, gold, silver and bronze levels that will eventually have to be met as part of the meeting sanctioning process. Cities bidding to host upcoming World Athletics Series events, for which bids launched in the latter half of 2022, will be required to commit to a gold level achievement, making sustainability a core feature of all future World Athletics championships events.
World Athletics began piloting the system at its one-day meetings in 2022 and is encouraging all licensed events to continue the pilot in 2023 before its implementation at their editions in 2024 and 2025.
World Athletics will continue to provide support for organisers via one-on-one meetings, an ongoing webinar series, a range of e-learning modules, visits to live events and the development of a knowledge bank of information and case studies on the World Athletics website.