How a Warming Planet Is Rewriting the Science of Human Movement

Rising global temperatures are quietly transforming one of the most fundamental aspects of human life: the ability to move. A sweeping new analysis of more than 2,400 scientific publications has mapped, for the first time at this scale, how researchers across disciplines have responded to the collision between climate change and human physical activity, sport, and physical education. The study, published in SN Social Sciences, examined 2,424 Scopus-indexed articles and reviews published between 2015 and 2025, using sophisticated science-mapping tools to trace how a once-fragmented literature is coalescing into a distinct field of inquiry that its authors describe as climate-responsive movement scholarship.

The research team, led by Joseph Lobo of Bulacan State University in the Philippines together with colleagues from institutions across the Philippines and Malaysia, combined quantitative bibliometrics with an integrative thematic synthesis. Using the Bibliometrix and Biblioshiny platforms alongside VOSviewer, a widely used software package for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks, the team charted the conceptual landscape of a decade of scholarship. Their analysis revealed a field that is expanding rapidly but unevenly, anchored in a handful of dominant themes while other crucial areas remain strikingly underdeveloped.

The gravitational center of the literature, the analysis found, is heat. Studies of heat stress, thermoregulation, exertional heat illness, heat acclimation, and exercise in hot environments form the field’s intellectual core. This is hardly surprising from a physiological standpoint. When humans exercise, skeletal muscle converts chemical energy into mechanical work with substantial waste heat, and the body must dissipate that heat to maintain a safe core temperature. As ambient temperature and humidity rise, the gradient that drives heat loss from skin to environment shrinks, cardiovascular strain increases, and the risk of heat exhaustion and potentially fatal exertional heat stroke climbs. Foundational work cited in the review, including consensus statements from sports medicine bodies and landmark papers on the biophysics of human temperature regulation, has built a robust evidence base on how athletes can train, acclimatize, and compete safely in the heat.

But the review shows the literature has broadened well beyond the playing field. A second major cluster connects climate change to everyday physical activity and public health. Researchers have documented how hot weather suppresses outdoor activity, with studies showing that rising ambient temperatures reduce trail use in urban Texas, curtail preschoolers’ outdoor play, and moderate the relationship between built environment features and adult activity levels. One widely cited analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2017 projected that unmitigated climate change could substantially alter human physical activity patterns, with the burden falling unevenly across populations. More recent panel data spanning 156 countries from 2000 to 2022, cited in the review, links climate change to increased physical inactivity, framing sedentary behavior as another casualty of a warming world.

This creates what public health researchers describe as a cruel feedback loop. Physical inactivity is itself a leading risk factor for noncommunicable disease, and active forms of transport such as walking and cycling are among the most effective strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If heat makes people less willing to walk, cycle, or exercise outdoors, climate change simultaneously undermines both human health and one of the key tools for mitigating climate change itself. The review highlights work on the co-benefits of active travel interventions, which show that well-designed urban environments can promote movement while cutting emissions, and on the substantial but globally unequal cooling capacity of urban green spaces, which mediate how heat shapes the environments in which people might otherwise be active.

A third strand of the literature addresses sport as both victim and contributor. Sport ecology, an emerging subdiscipline within sport management, examines how climate change disrupts climate-dependent sports, from winter sports facing vanishing snowpack to outdoor competitions rescheduled around extreme heat. At the same time, researchers have quantified the carbon footprint of active sport participants and the emissions of the global sport sector, calling for measurement, mitigation, and meaningful institutional change. The review notes that scholarship on policy versus practice in sport and climate change reveals a persistent gap between the commitments of global sport organizations and the realities on the ground, particularly in international development contexts.

Perhaps the most consequential finding of the bibliometric mapping concerns what is missing. Physical education, the institutional setting where hundreds of millions of children first encounter structured movement, remains comparatively peripheral within the field’s conceptual structure. While a growing body of work explores education for sustainable development in physical education, the integration of climate change education into physical education curricula, and the role of physical education in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, these themes sit at the margins of the citation network rather than its core. The authors argue this represents a significant blind spot, because schools are where climate-responsive habits, thermal literacy, and adaptive movement skills could be cultivated at population scale.

The analysis also exposed stark geographic inequities in knowledge production. Although international collaboration is substantial, with co-authorship networks spanning continents, the literature remains dominated by research from high-income countries in temperate climates. This matters because the populations most exposed to extreme heat, often in tropical and subtropical regions of the Global South, are precisely those underrepresented in the evidence base. Related scholarship on conservation science cited in the review describes how intersectional inequities can render local scholarship conditionally visible, marginalized within global publication systems. Without research from the hottest and most vulnerable regions, guidelines for safe exercise and sport risk being calibrated to bodies, climates, and infrastructure that do not reflect the conditions most of the world’s movers actually face.

Synthesizing these patterns, the authors propose a climate-responsive movement agenda that links five domains: physiological safety, movement access, sport continuity, climate-responsive pedagogy, and knowledge equity. The agenda treats these as interdependent rather than separate problems. An athlete cannot train safely without heat acclimation protocols and medical surveillance; a child cannot be active without shaded playgrounds and thermally considerate urban design; a community cannot sustain its sporting life without adaptation planning; and the global research enterprise cannot produce fair guidance without the participation of scholars from the most affected regions. The framework is presented as an interpretive direction rather than a rigid prescription, intended to guide researchers, practitioners, and policymakers toward movement systems that are safer, more adaptive, and more equitable.

The stakes of this agenda are rising with the thermometer. Global risk assessments of deadly heat have documented that combinations of temperature and humidity once considered rare are becoming increasingly common across densely populated regions, and heat extremes are now recognized as a major health risk in their own right. As the review makes clear, the question is no longer whether climate change will affect how humans move, train, and play, but whether the institutions governing physical activity, sport, and education will adapt quickly enough to keep movement possible for everyone. The decade of scholarship mapped by this analysis provides the conceptual scaffolding; the challenge now, the authors suggest, is to build the equitable, evidence-based systems that scaffolding was designed to support.

Subject of Research: Climate-responsive physical activity, sport, and physical education research

Article Title: ‘Keeping movement possible in a warming world’: a bibliometric and thematic review of climate-responsive physical activity, sport, and physical education (2015–2025)

Article References: Lobo, J., Mendoza, J. J. N., Canizares-Magalona, J., Cariaga, J. N., Peralta, E. M. E., & Ebardo, G. J. M. (2026). ‘Keeping movement possible in a warming world’: a bibliometric and thematic review of climate-responsive physical activity, sport, and physical education (2015–2025). SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 524. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01840-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01840-8

Keywords: climate change, physical activity, sport, physical education, heat stress, thermoregulation, exertional heat illness, heat acclimation, public health, bibliometrics, sport ecology, environmental justice