World Sailing measures the environmental impact of the sport's Olympic equipment for the first time

The governing body for sailing is looking at how the sport's Olympic-class equipment is made, used and discarded, to eventually make changes that will reduce its environmental impact.

Alexandra Rickham, director of sustainability at World Sailing, said this first-of-a-kind life cycle assessment project will give the organization the evidence it needs to make smarter choices and shape the future of Olympic equipment.

“Sailing naturally has a close relationship with nature, with the environment. It's seen very much as this clean, green sport using the wind,” she said. “But the reality is that our equipment has an impact. It goes through some major industrial processes.”

Rickham said the project could be useful not just for Olympic sailing but for the broader sailing community and potentially other sports.

Competitive sailing, an Olympic sport since 1900, involves racing boats powered by only the wind and the waves. In the 2024 Olympics, one- and two-person crews sailed boats with hulls measuring as long as 17 feet (5 meters) around a course marked by buoys in the Bay of Marseille.

Outside the Olympics, competitive sailors race throughout the year in local events and larger regattas.

The boats are commonly made of carbon fiber, fiberglass and PVC foam, which take a lot of energy to produce in processes that emit carbon pollution. These materials don't decompose and are challenging to recycle. So when elite sailors are done with them, the boats would need to be sold, passed onto junior sailors or sent for specialized recycling to avoid landfills.

As part of World Sailing's initiative, the sustainability consultancy Marine Futures is collecting data from boat builders about their operations and surveying athletes about how many boats, sails, masts and other gear they use, how often they replace their equipment and how they travel with their vessels.

By the end of this year, the goal is to capture the environmental impact of a four-year Olympic cycle and identify which interventions by World Sailing could make the most difference, said Ollie Taylor, director of Marine Futures. Taylor said those could include encouraging builders to incorporate reusable materials, redesigning boats, shifting competition schedules to minimize travel and boat transport, or taking steps to ensure equipment is reused.

The goal is to remove guesswork and put data behind every decision, Taylor said.

Michelle Carnevale, president of the environmental organization 11th Hour Racing, said the effort shows how much progress has been made in recent years. Sustainability wasn’t talked about much in the sailing world a decade ago, and now environmental monitoring and benchmarking could become embedded into the rules of the sport, said Carnevale, whose organization sponsored the development of software being used in the project.

Walker Ross, an expert on sport ecology and sustainability at the University of Edinburgh, said he loves World Sailing's leadership on sustainability and wishes more sports organizations were as thoughtful.

“Many sports have specialized equipment that can be quite resource intensive to produce and which are therefore difficult to recycle at the end of their useful lives,” he wrote in an email Wednesday.

Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, commended World Sailing for tackling the environmental impacts of boat construction. But Parkinson, whose organization calculates the environmental impact of major sporting events, said the biggest impacts of international sports come from travel, especially air travel by spectators.

At the Olympic level, sailors often buy equipment in multiples to pick out the best one in the hopes of gaining a competitive edge. That can add up to more waste, said Olympian Dave Hughes, who competed and coached for the U.S. team.

“There is a certain amount of competition to always have the best equipment and that can create a variety of opportunities for places where we can save on waste,” said Hughes, chair of the committee representing athletes at World Sailing.

Hughes said that if World Sailing can work with manufacturers to create higher standards, there would be less variation and less incentive to source multiple options for a given piece of equipment such as masts, foils or sails. That would help the environment and lower teams' costs, said Hughes.

“Our connection to the ocean environment is daily, so therefore our experience of how the planet is changing is also daily,” Hughes said.

Santiago Sampaio, chief technical officer of the International Laser Class Association, which oversees a type of single-handed racing dinghy used in the Olympics, said he thinks it is possible to reduce the amount of equipment used by sailors annually and to use building materials that don't harm the environment. The association is testing whether high-density PVC foam on the ILCA sailboat could be replaced with environmentally friendly recycled PET plastic.

Sampaio said it will be important to consider whether any change would impact a boat's performance or longevity, render thousands of other boats already in use obsolete, or make it unaffordable for some teams to compete.

“We don't want to make a boat that is too expensive. It’s great for the environment, but then we don’t have people in Fiji or in Ghana or Angola that can actually buy this environmentally sustainable boat, and then we lose those people.”

Rickham said that ideally any changes or new regulations based on the project's findings will be in place for the 2032 Olympics, if not earlier. The data could be used for selecting some equipment suppliers for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Starting in 2032, Olympic sailing classes will be required to provide an independently verified life cycle assessment.

Rickham said World Sailing hopes the wider sailing community and other sports organizations will follow its lead.

“That’s where our biggest area of impact is: the ripple effect that we can drive across Olympic sports and the industry of boating and recreational boating going forward,” she said.

Madeleine Orr, assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto, thinks that could happen. World Sailing will have the data needed to push its suppliers to adopt more sustainable materials and circular options, and those suppliers' other clients span the whole boating sector, Orr said.

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FILE - Marit Bouwmeester, of the Netherlands, sails back to the harbor after ILCA 6 dinghy class final race was postponed during the 2024 Summer Olympics, Aug. 6, 2024, in Marseille, France. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

FILE - Louise Cervera of France practices before the start of the women's dinghy race during the 2024 Summer Olympics, Aug. 4, 2024, in Marseille, France. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)

FILE - Helene Noesmoen, of France, leads a pack while competing in a women's iQFOiL windsurfing class quarterfinal race during the 2024 Summer Olympics, Aug. 3, 2024, in Marseille, France. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

FILE - Anna Burnet and John Gimson, of Britain, compete in the Nacra 17 mixed multihull sailing race during the 2024 Summer Olympics, Aug. 6, 2024, in Marseille, France. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

FILE - A fleet of boats from around the world compete in a men's skiff event sailing race Sunday July 28, 2024, during 2024 Summer Olympics sailing competition in Marseille, France. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that foreign leaders — including those “on the other side of the Atlantic” — are trying to exploit France's tense social climate for their own political agenda.

Protests over soaring living costs have led to widespread rioting and looting in France.

U.S. President Donald Trump has used the violence to rally his political supporters, making unsubstantiated claims that Muslim migrants are responsible for the unrest, and urging Macron to “close your borders and take control before it is too late!”

Macron responded by saying there “has been foreign manipulation of information in the aftermath” of the looting in Paris and other French cities last weekend.

“And that has led to comments that are as unacceptable as they are stupid, from many people, including foreign leaders,” he said.

Asked by a reporter if he was referring to Trump, Macron replied: “Among others.”

Macron then added that there have been "AI-generated images depicting scenes that never actually happened in France. We’ve had people claiming that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, which is completely false.”

Macron did not specify which AI-generated images he was referring to, nor how he knew the content was false. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said its office can provide the countries concerned with the necessary clarification, “to help them avoid spreading or amplifying false information and making baseless claims on social media.”

Macron and Trump once enjoyed a good relationship but Trump regularly mocks the French president in his public speeches.

“The fact is, all the people who are speaking ill of our country right now are people who don’t love our country," Macron said. “So those people really bother me.”

“When I see leaders who are in the middle of election campaigns, whether in the region or on the other side of the Atlantic — who sometimes naively repeat AI-generated content or spread narratives that certain circles are clearly trying to promote about what happened in France — they’re using our country for their own political campaigns," said Macron. "And we don’t need that.”

Macron was speaking in Qatar at the end of a tour of key energy suppliers in Gulf Arab states, where he secured an additional 100,000 metric tons of diesel per month from the United Arab Emirates, with a further 100,000 tons to be confirmed in Bahrain.

Macron's office said he traveled to the Middle East to find solutions to the energy crisis and rising energy prices, and to secure supplies of oil, gas, diesel and jet fuel.

The Elysee said nearly 295,000 additional tons of diesel per month could be secured, including volumes from Saudi Arabia, equivalent to more than 10% of France's monthly diesel consumption.

EDS NOTE: OBSCENITY - Protesters confront police during a demonstration against rising living costs and in support of students’ grievances in Paris, Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026.(AP Photo/Emma Da Silva)

A protesters holds a French flag during a demonstration against rising living costs, joining students' grievances, in Lyon, France, Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A man walks past a looted store the day after a demonstration against rising living costs and in solidarity with students’ grievances, in Paris, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Emma Da Silva)

President Donald Trump is reflected in protective glass after speaking at a campaign rally at Pitt–Greenville Airport, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, in Greenville, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Ramey)

In this photograph released by the state-run WAM news agency, United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, right, greets French President Emmanuel Macron upon his arrival in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Monday, Oct. 19, 2026. (WAM via AP)