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

The research team, led by Professor Stephen Heung-Sang Wong and Assistant Professor Eric Tsz-Chun Poon of the Department of Sports Science and Physical Education, conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 23 studies involving 413 participants. The work was designed to disentangle two sources of physiological stress that are usually bundled together in heat acclimation programs. Exercise in hot conditions, abbreviated ExH, combines environmental heat load with the metabolic heat generated by working muscles. Exercise in thermoneutral conditions, or ExN, generates only the internal heat of muscular work. By comparing these two training modes directly, the researchers could isolate the additional contribution of environmental heat exposure.

The analytical framework was deliberately comprehensive. Three complementary comparisons were performed: ExH versus ExN, pre- versus post-intervention responses following ExH, and pre- versus post-intervention responses following ExN. The primary outcomes spanned the key markers of heat adaptation used across the exercise physiology literature: aerobic performance under hot conditions, resting core temperature, exercise core temperature, exercise skin temperature, exercise heart rate, and sweat rate. This structure allowed the team to evaluate not only which training mode performed better against the other, but also whether each mode, on its own, produced meaningful physiological change.

The headline finding is unambiguous. Compared with thermoneutral exercise, exercise performed in the heat produced greater improvements in aerobic performance under heat stress, greater reductions in resting core temperature, greater reductions in exercise core temperature, greater reductions in exercise heart rate, and a greater increase in sweat rate. In other words, the classic constellation of heat acclimation adaptations, spanning both cardiovascular and thermoregulatory systems, was more fully developed when environmental heat was part of the training stimulus. The one exception was exercise skin temperature, where no significant difference emerged between the two training conditions.

These results carry particular weight because they address a long-standing ambiguity in the field. Exercise itself is a potent thermal stressor. Sustained skeletal muscle contraction dramatically increases metabolic heat production, and even in a temperate environment this internal heat load can elevate body temperature and strain the cardiovascular system. Some adaptations traditionally credited to hot-weather training might therefore be attributable, at least in part, to exercise-generated metabolic heat rather than to the ambient environment. The new meta-analysis confirms that this is true to a degree, but also demonstrates that environmental heat exposure provides an adaptive stimulus that metabolic heat alone cannot fully substitute for.

Indeed, the within-group analyses revealed that thermoneutral exercise was far from physiologically inert. Following ExN training, participants showed a significant reduction in exercise core temperature of approximately 0.14 degrees Celsius, alongside a decrease in exercise heart rate of approximately 5.6 beats per minute during subsequent exercise in the heat. These figures suggest that ordinary exercise training, performed without any deliberate heat exposure, can cultivate a modest degree of heat resilience, likely through the combined effects of exercise-induced metabolic heat production and general training adaptations such as improved cardiovascular function and expanded plasma volume.

Nevertheless, the magnitude and breadth of adaptation were consistently greater for exercise in the heat. Professor Wong emphasized the practical meaning of this pattern, noting that the findings indicate additional environmental heat exposure during exercise provides a meaningful adaptive stimulus beyond that produced by exercise alone, particularly for cardiovascular and thermoregulatory responses. For populations whose safety and performance depend on operating effectively in hot conditions, from elite athletes preparing for competitions in warm climates to workers in physically demanding outdoor occupations, the message is that deliberate heat exposure remains an essential ingredient of preparation.

The meta-analysis also identified two important moderators of the effect. The benefits of exercising in the heat were greater with longer interventions, indicating that heat adaptation is a dose-dependent process that accrues over time rather than a switch that flips after a few sessions. The benefits were also more pronounced among elite athletes, a finding that may reflect both the greater training loads such individuals can tolerate and their capacity to push thermoregulatory systems closer to their adaptive limits. For recreational exercisers, the adaptations from heat training may still be valuable, but the ceiling of improvement appears higher in highly trained populations.

Dr. Poon framed the dual message of the study, stating that the findings support the use of exercise in the heat as an effective strategy for enhancing heat tolerance and improving aerobic performance under heat stress, while simultaneously highlighting the potential contribution of exercise itself to the development of partial heat-related adaptations. This distinction matters enormously for the design of practical, safe, and individualized strategies. Heat acclimation carries inherent risks, including the potential for heat illness if sessions are poorly managed, so knowing that ordinary training confers some baseline protection, while targeted heat exposure delivers the full adaptation package, allows practitioners to calibrate programs to individual needs, schedules, and risk profiles.

The broader context gives this work its urgency. Global warming is substantially increasing the frequency, duration, and intensity of human exposure to high ambient temperatures, and heatwaves are projected to occur more often and last longer, exposing a growing share of the population to potentially harmful thermal stress. Elevated heat exposure is associated with increased risks of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, heat stroke, cardiac arrest, and other heat-related illnesses. Current public health recommendations, including those from the World Health Organization, primarily emphasize minimizing heat exposure, keeping indoor environments cool, and maintaining adequate hydration. Yet complete avoidance of heat is often impractical given occupational demands, commuting, recreation, and routine physical activity. In that reality, strategies that build physiological resilience and enhance heat tolerance offer a complementary line of defense, and this meta-analysis provides a rigorous, evidence-based map of which training tools deliver which adaptations, and how much of each the human body actually requires.

Subject of Research: Comparative effects of exercise in hot versus thermoneutral conditions on heat-related physiological adaptations

Article Title: Where does heat adaptation come from: Environmental heat exposure or exercise itself?

Article References: Where does heat adaptation come from: Environmental heat exposure or exercise itself?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: heat acclimation, exercise physiology, meta-analysis, thermoregulation, core temperature, sweat rate, aerobic performance, heart rate, global warming, heat stress, athletic training, public health