The sports world has not engaged strongly enough on climate change yet, at least as not as far as I’m concerned. Maybe that will change now that a new report shows climate change will negatively impact the world barley crop, thus threatening…BEER! The Milwaukee Bucks’ Malcolm Brogdon and four other NBA players just launched Hoops2O to help bring fresh water to East Africa by funding the digging of wells. And Japan, a country which has long embraced recycling, turns its broken baseball bats into chopsticks. All in a “Spanning the Globe” GSB News & Notes.

DROUGHT AND HEAT COULD IMPERIL WORLD’S BEER SUPPLY; WILL SPORTS INDUSTRY GET MORE ENGAGED ON CLIMATE CHANGE?

Beer and sports go together like Minneapolis and St. Paul.

So maybe, just maybe, a potential beer shortage might spur the sports industry to take faster, more meaningful action on climate change.

A new report in Nature, by an international team of scientists, considered how climate change might affect the barley crop over the next 80 years. Barley is the most widely used grain in beer making^.

Barley, the most widely used grain in beer making, will be under threat from climate change (Photo credit: Beer Smith)

Researchers in China, Britain and the United States say that by the end of the century, drought and heat could hurt barley crops enough to cause significant beer shortages.

Given the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, a beer shortage might seem trivial.

That’s why, according to one of the report’s authors, Dabo Guan, of Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, the report was directed at readers in the developed world — to suggest that climate change will hit everyone, not just the poor.

Dabo Guan (Photo credit: University of East Anglia)

“We will suffer less,” Guan told James Gorman of The New York Times. “but we will still suffer. [Climate change] may not affect our bread but it will affect our beer.”

Guan and his team merged mathematical models of the impact of climate change on barley crops with models of international trade.

The results revealed that, China and the United States, which drink the most beer of all countries, would experience the most drastic effects. “Under the worst scenario,” Guan told Gorman, “China would lose 10 percent of its beer supply and the United States 15 to 20 percent.”

In models that include high numbers of severe droughts, the price of a bottle of beer in Ireland might double. In the Czech Republic, it could be six or seven times as expensive.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewing company, has taken notice. Jess Newman, the company’s director of agronomy in the United States, told Gorman for his Times piece, “We take climate uncertainty very seriously.”

GSB’s Take: I’ve been trying to find the “magic bullet” that would get sports teams, leagues and mega-events to engage fans on climate change in a meaningful way. Could a potential beer shortage do the trick? If that shortage would come down the pike in the next three to five years, maybe. But, since this report’s time frame is 80 years, I doubt the sports industry will take much notice.

NBA’S MALCOLM BROGDON’S HOOPS₂O JOINS NFL’S CHRIS LONG’S WATERBOYS IN BRINGING WELLS AND FRESH WATER TO EAST AFRICA

Milwaukee Bucks point guard Malcolm Brogdon and four other NBA players announced the launch of Hoops₂O, joining the fight for access to clean water in East Africa. Rounding out the Hoops₂O “Starting 5” are Justin Anderson (Atlanta Hawks), Joe Harris, (Brooklyn Nets), Garrett Temple (Memphis Grizzlies), and Anthony Tolliver (Minnesota Timberwolves).

Malcolm Brogdon, Milwaukee Bucks point guard (Photo credit: Stacy Revere, Getty Images)

Traveling to Ghana and Malawi as a child and seeing the effects of extreme poverty in those countries gave the former University of Virginia star the drive to use his platform as an NBA player to make a difference in Africa.  “I saw from a very young age the value of clean water in communities in Africa,” said Brogdon. “I made a promise to myself that once I reached a time and place in my career where I could do more, I would.

Hoops₂O looks to build upon the successful Waterboys program midwifed and led by Chris Long, a fellow UVa alum, and a two-time Super Bowl Champion defensive end, now with the Philadelphia Eagles. Waterboys, with support from more than 20 current and retired NFL players, funds the digging of wells in the area and teaches the locals how to do the digging and maintaining. To date, Waterboys has raised more $2.6 million to fund 49 wells that will provide water to over 193,000 people.

Brogdon took notice: “When I learned about Chris’ Waterboys initiative and saw their accomplishments by working as a team of players to inspire action, I knew I wanted to expand his vision into the NBA and address our ultimate shared goal to save more lives faster and transform communities.”

Malcolm Brogdon, founder of Hoops₂o at a Waterboys well site in East Africa (Photo credit: Clay Cook Photography)

To get Hoops₂O off the ground, the Starting 5 are asking fans to get involved by participating in the “Ballin’ for Buckets” campaign. Fans are encouraged to pledge a dollar amount per stat line (i.e. points Brogdon will score, the number of 3-pointers Tolliver will hit) for one of the Starting 5 players for the month of November.

Brogdon and each of his Starting 5 teammates also made financial pledges to support Ballin’ for Buckets. Player stat tracking will begin on November 1, but fans can make a pledge now. To learn more and make a pledge, fans are encouraged to visit www.hoops2o.org.

The Starting 5’s goal is to raise $45,000 — the cost of building one solar paneled, sustainable, deep borehole well — by the end of November. Brogdon and friends hope to raise $225,000 to fund five wells by the end of the NBA season next spring.

“I’m honored that our work is expanding into the NBA,” added Waterboys Founder Chris Long. “I couldn’t be more excited about what this will mean for our neighbors who lack access to a fundamental resource. I’m confident that working together as a united front, the NFL’s Waterboys and the NBA’s Starting 5 will bring us one step closer to providing water to one million people.”

Philadelphia Eagles defensive end Chris Long, co-founder of Waterboys (Photo credit: WPVI-TV Philadelphia)

GSB’s Take: Kudos to Brogdon and his mates for getting involved in the water crisis in East Africa. Basketball and the NBA are very popular across Africa so it’s a natural connection. Could NBA partner Coca-Cola should provide financial and other support that could help scale Hoops₂O. Why not?

JAPAN BASEBALL: BROKEN BASEBALL BATS MORPH INTO CHOPSTICKS

When batters from the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and the Hiroshima Toyo Carp come to the plate in the Japan Series, which started on Saturday, they will be carrying bats made overseas from white ash and maple, like their major league counterparts. But up until about 15 years ago, most Japanese professionals, including future big leaguers stars Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki used bats made from wood from the aodamo, a species of ash tree native to Japan.

Since bat makers did not replant the trees as they were cut, aodamo is no longer economically feasible to log on the northern island of Hokkaido, the capital of Japanese bat production. It can take 50 to 70 years for an aodamo tree to grow to a height and thickness needed to make bats. The hope is that if a comprehensive reforestation project is successful, aodamo will again become feasible for baseball towards the latter part of the century.

To make that a reality, conservationists and aodamo bat enthusiasts need to drum up interest in restoring the tree population now.

That is where turning broken bats into chopsticks comes in.

The germ for this idea was born in 2000. According to Jeré Longman of The New York Times, “An article in The Nikkei financial newspaper and other Japanese publications first sounded alarms about the decreased availability of aodamo wood. The Nikkei article was read by officials at the Hyozaemon chopsticks company [and its] chief executive [and former high school baseball player], Hyogoo Uratani.”

At that time, broken bats were mostly given away or burned in barrels to keep players warm during spring training. Uratani and his friend Takeo Minatoya, who had been a general manager in the Japanese Central League, conjured the bats-into-chopsticks program to publicize the aodamo wood problem.

Only the barrel of the bat is thick enough to make chopsticks.^ The barrel is sawed from the handle, sliced vertically into thin blocks then sanded by craftsmen into the shape of chopsticks. Hyozaemon officials told Longman, “the barrel of one bat can yield five or six pairs of chopsticks.”

Broken baseball bats used to be burned in Japan. Now they become chopsticks. (Photo credit; Shiho Fukada/The New York Times)

Today, all 12 teams in Japan’s Central and Pacific Leagues take part in the bats-to-chopsticks initiative. The company  collects an average of 10,000 broken bats each season.

Per Longman, “Hyozaemon pays a licensing fee to put team logos on its chopsticks. In turn, Nippon Professional Baseball, Japan’s equivalent of Major League Baseball, makes an annual contribution of 3.5 million yen, or about $31,000, to the nonprofit Aodamo Preservation Society. The money is used to plant aodamo seedlings on Hokkaido.”

More than aodamo 10,000 trees have been planted so far with many more to come.

Chopsticks from broken bats display logos from Japan’s Central and Pacific League teams (Photo credit: Shiho Fukada/The New York Times)

^ In addition to the barrel being used for chopsticks, the tapered portion toward the handle can be repurposed into shoehorns and handles for forks and spoons. The cap of the bat can be made into a drinking cup.

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