Professor Jim Cotter stops to think carefully about what hes going to say.

He wants it to come across the right way. Plus, its tricky asking tough questions about sport, the sacred cow of New Zealand society.

But its time: I don't really don't want to put blame anywhere because in many ways they're trying to do the right thing, says the Otago University environmental exercise physiologist.

Yet when Cotter was asked to deliver a keynote address at the Sports and Exercise Science Conference last month, he found there was only one thing he wanted to talk about: climate change.

Specifically, are high performance sports hurting the very conditions we rely on for a healthy life? And for those sitting on the couch watching from home, are our sedentary lifestyles leaving us more vulnerable as the planet warms up?

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It seems counterintuitive to have a dig at sports. After all, when people think of sports, they often think of being outside in the fresh air, wild and free, running around at a park: what could be better for the environment?

But Cotter says, whoa, hold on a second theres a lot more to it than that.

In elite sport, there are things which have become accepted norms that he thinks need seriously reconsidering: altitude training and overseas competitions, for instance.

Even in kids sports: do parents really need to be dropping their kids off for lengthy warm-ups?

And, as a society, he says, its time to think about how the way we live is diminishing our ability to cope with climate change.

In the process of us making a built, protected environment were making the real environment more extreme, and we're also making ourselves less resilient, says Cotter.

We're going towards a train wreck, and we know it's happening.

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A Cotter family adventure at Mt Titiroa, with Professor Jim Cotter's children Lucy, Hamish, and Grace. Cotter grew up on the West Coast, where he developed a love for the outdoors.

You could say that Cotter's connection to the environment is coursing in his veins. He grew up in Rotomanu, in the wilds of the West Coast; a childhood filled with grazed knees from scrambling through the bush and wet hair from floating down the river on tractor tyre inner tubes.

We were free to explore, which was acutely dangerous, probably, but it gives you a capability, mentally as much as anything. You just relish in that freedom, and your parents literally didnt know where you were as long as you were home for dinner.

Cotter studied for a science degree at Otago, majoring in physiology and physical education, before completing a doctorate in environmental physiology at the University of Wollongong. He landed a job at the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation where he investigated how people cope with adverse environmental conditions, a field of research he has kept up for the past two decades.

Cotter has been back at Otago University for almost 20 years, during which time hes also sustained his love of the outdoors and competing himself. He was an original at the first Kepler Challenge, a 60 km mountain race over the Great Walk in Fiordland, and fondly remembers early Coast to Coast races, just for the adventure of it.

Other favourite outdoor memories include taking on traverses of the Southern Alps, especially being a useful part of a small, well-functioning group negotiating through some pretty amazing places.

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Cotter's daughter, Grace, on a family adventure at Ball Pass, Aoraki. For the past few decades he has studied how humans cope in extreme environments.

For someone who has enjoyed a life of fitness, then, you can sense a tinge of sadness from Cotter about the decline in the countrys fitness levels. He cites figures from the Dunedin longitudinal multidisciplinary study that show how much fitness has slipped. Fathers are about 20 per cent fitter than their sons, and mothers are about 35 per cent fitter than their daughters that's one generation.

As well as the health impacts of declining fitness and increasing weight (at the moment, theres one person in the world dying every eight seconds from Covid-19 theres one person every six seconds dying from Type Two diabetes alone), he worries about how we are becoming less conditioned to cope with climate change.

There are physical benefits of fitness your body is more efficient at coping with heat, for instance but theres a mental benefit too.

Fitter people have more mental resilience, he says. In one study of this, endurance athletes, team sport players and sedentary people held their arms in ice-cold water to see how long they could last.

After two minutes, 90 per cent of the endurance athletes still had their arms in the water, whereas only half of the other two groups did. That either tells you endurance athletes are stupid or theyre stubborn, he laughs, or theyre mentally resilient. Cotter believes its the third option.

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Jim Cotter says fitness helps build mental resilience.

And resilience is going to come in handy as climate change unfolds with fitness, youve got the capacity to tolerate more.

How do we build resilience? Choosing to bike to work or not turning the air conditioner on. Its not only our physical capabilities its what were prepared to put up with.

Meanwhile, the environment weve built for ourselves is not helping us in our ability to react and adapt.

Our constructed environment insidiously removes transiently useful stresses. What does he mean by this? By making things too easy for our bodies, they dont learn how to deal with the stresses of heat, for instance.

We don't have thermal stress because if it gets hot, we turn the air conditioner on, if it gets cold, we put a heater on. We don't expend physiological costs to move against gravity because we make the remote controls open our doors.

We make it easy for us and in the process, it decays what we are.

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Sports teams travel the world for competitions but is all that flying the right thing to do?

In his speech to the conference, his early slides made their way through those impacts of fitness and mental resilience topics where, in the most part, there are choices to be made for individuals.

Then it came to the touchier topic: how high performance sport is coping with, and impacting, climate change.

Again, as he speaks, he emphasises he doesnt want to put the boot in, like some thuggish oaf on the rugby field. His preference is to start a conversation, not blow the whistle.

After all, there is plenty at stake for sports themselves. Already, scientists are warning about the impact of climate change on cricket, for instance not just because of increasing temperatures, or loss of topsoil, but raising the question whether increased pressure on resources will lead to conflict in some regions. You cant play a test match in a warzone.

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Scientists are already warning about the impact of climate change on the future of sports, including cricket.

Sports organisations, Cotter says, talk about sustainability, but Im asking them to think about whether theyre prioritising this stuff enough.

Were living in the age of decadence. And sport, I think, is part of that decadence.

International competition, for instance, has teams flying around the world, stomping large carbon bootprints around the planet. Again, its not about blame academics are just as bad. We travel the world, and we dont necessarily need to.

But hes calling on sports to reconsider their priorities. Covid taught sports that it was possible to have virtual races, for instance, athletes competing in their home countries and comparing results. Its not the same as racing side-by-side, no, but maybe every second championship could be virtual and then youve immediately halved your footprint.

And when it comes to flying teams around the world, maybe they need to reconsider how big a squad they take, including support staff. Saving just one flight would make a significant reduction in the cost to the environment.

But Cotter is not interested in lecturing sports and their administrators. As a member of the sports science community, he says, he and his colleagues are here to help.

If he has a plea, its that sports listen to the science.

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Many endurance athletes head to high altitude areas to try to help their bodies boost their oxygen-carrying capacity but is that a good idea?

Take altitude training, for instance. For decades, athletes in endurance sports have put great stock on going to high altitudes for training camps to gain the benefits of boosting the oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood.

And yet, says Cotter, studies have established that many athletes dont get any benefit from being at altitude its a gene response issue and there are tests that can be done at sea level to see who will or wont gain from being in the mountains.

Weve known this for 20 years, and we still dont even do the basic testing before we send a whole team off to the other side of the world. Its destructive in two respects: ones on the planet, and ones on the individuals adaptability.

If teams want the benefit of being in camp, why not send them to Whngarei instead of Europe or Colorado?

Besides, he says, in a paper published this year scientists showed it was possible to get the same blood-boosting effect without having to go to altitude: by micro-dosing with carbon monoxide.

Before people react to carbon monoxide, Cotter points out, if we live in a city, we have carbon monoxide in our blood.

So, whats he saying, instead of heading for the hills, go sit in traffic?

Cotter laughs. You might say, micro-dosing with carbon monoxide is not ethical. But is this ethical, flying to the other side of the world? Especially when many athletes will get no physiological benefit.

Look, I dont know the answers to these things. But he thinks its important to ask the questions, and think about them.

Otherwise, we just go along with the accepted norms, even when theyre unproven.

This sets Cotter off on another example: warm-ups. Teams and individual athletes build up their warm-up routines which can often take an hour or more.

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Professor Jim Cotter encourages New Zealanders to get out in the wild outdoors to not only build fitness but to build empathy for the natural environment.

But Cotter says, as far as the body is concerned, this is unnecessary. We've been doing studies on muscle temperature response to exercise and it takes about two minutes to warm a muscle up. We think even for very high intensity using all energy systems at maximum you probably need about six minutes.

Six minutes. Think about that next time you have to be at a ground an hour-and-a-half before kick-off to drop someone off.

Cotter points out this causes fuel pollution and road congestion. As the driver, you dont want to sit there and wait for an hour-and-a-half, so you go away and come back.

Coaches will say, but hang on, players need to get their heads in the game, too thats a part of warm-up. But is that because youve created the expectation that you need to spend an hour warming up? says Cotter.

In the meantime, he says, players unnecessarily burn fuel their muscles will need during the match or race, and kill their enthusiasm.

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Town planners can create environments that make it easier for people to choose to exercise.

Cotter is conscious of killing peoples enthusiasm. Its why he doesnt want to turn people away from the problems of climate change by bashing their heads over it.

And why he thinks that, as a country, we need to find ways for people to become fitter, and to exercise and compete in a way that has a lower environmental impact.

We have to do something that works with the environment and utilises it, doesnt damage it, and develops empathy for it.

To that end, he says, its not coaches, athletes or scientists who will have the biggest impact.

The most important people are the people who create an environment where people will exercise: so that's city planners.

We can't afford not to prioritise active lifestyles because we simply won't have the health budget to deal with what's coming, and we have climate change we have to engage.

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Are sports hurting the climate? (And other awkward questions) - Stuff.co.nz