Can golf courses be good for ecology when they use so much water and pesticide to maintain an artificial environment? Hong Kong Golf Club vies for eco-friendly prize
- Golf courses may shout natural beauty, but they are artificial and come with a high environmental cost
- Nevertheless, some are trying to reduce their impact, cutting back on chemical and water use and letting rough grow wild
Amid all the industry backslapping at the World Golf Awards in October, with its prizes for best golf shoe brand and best golf TV channel, there will be an award for world’s best eco-friendly golf facility in 2021.
The Hong Kong Golf Club has been nominated and hopes to win at a gala ceremony to be held at the Park Hyatt Dubai hotel. In 2020, the club achieved certification from the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Programme for Golf (something achieved by the Jockey Club’s Kau Sai Chau Public Golf Course back in 2005) – which “helps golf courses protect our environment and preserve the natural heritage of the game of golf” – and joins others in a search for public recognition of golf’s ecological credentials.
But what is often promoted as outdoor exercise in nature takes place in highly artificial environments, the maintenance of which exacts a high environmental cost. For golf to present itself as eco-friendly while pouring vast quantities of chemicals on spaces carefully flattened and frequently mown to resemble billiard tables seems the most apt use of the term “greenwashing” yet.
In July 2006, researchers Kit Wheeler and John Nauright published a paper in the journal Sport in Society that took golf’s claims of sound environmental management to task: A Global Perspective on the Environmental Impact of Golf criticised deforestation and the harmful clearing of natural vegetation, the introduction of non-native species, the contamination of streams and lakes with chemicals, high water consumption and much else.
To read the certification prospectus of the Audubon programme is to suspect that its creators read this paper, too. Key, says Audubon International’s director of environmental programmes for golf, Frank LaVardera, is a reduction in each course’s overall managed area.
“A typical 18-hole golf course,” he explains, “may have 65 or 70 acres (26 or 28 hectares) of managed turf that typically includes its greens, its fairways, its tee boxes and the rough.”