How to align your infrastructure project with Environmentally Sustainable Design and improve your odds of funding

Sporting infrastructure funding rounds are increasingly assessed against environmental criteria, whether or not that criteria is stated outright in the guidelines. Clubs that treat Environmentally Sustainable Design (ESD) as an afterthought are competing on weaker terms than clubs who build it into the project from the outset, since the assessor reading the application is often working from a framework that already expects it.

Victoria’s 2026-27 Local Sports Infrastructure Fund closes for applications on 28 July, and sits within the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions’ broader priorities around sustainable, future-proofed community facilities. Sport and Recreation Victoria has also published a standalone ESD Fact Sheet to guide applicants toward the design principles it wants reflected in submissions, which most clubs preparing a facility upgrade have likely never opened.

The following is a guide to building ESD considerations into your next infrastructure project, and into the application that seeks to fund it.

Understand the framework behind the funding

Victoria’s Social Procurement Framework asks applicants to minimise waste and emissions, conserve energy and water, and avoid habitat degradation, all while delivering value for money. These aren’t values sitting alongside the infrastructure fund for optics. They are part of how the government defines what a well-designed project looks like, which means an application describing new changerooms without reference to insulation, water use or material choice is, by the government’s own framework, incomplete.

A stronger version of that same line item might read: new changerooms incorporating insulation upgrades and LED lighting to reduce ongoing energy costs. The difference in outcome may come down to how clearly the ESD principles are named rather than implied.

Work with the six ESD principles Sport and Recreation Victoria has outlined

SRV’s guidance is structured around six principles: optimising site potential, enhancing indoor environmental quality, optimising energy use, protecting and conserving water, optimising material and space use, and optimising operational and maintenance practices. Satisfying all six isn’t necessary for a competitive application, but clubs should be able to point to which of them the project speaks to and why.

According to historic trends, the grassroots facilities that recieve upgrades share these three variables.

Energy use is the most accessible starting point. Solar PV, solar hot water and LED lighting are common inclusions in clubroom or pavilion upgrades, and each has a direct line to reduced operating costs, which is worth stating explicitly since funders tend to read cost efficiency and sustainability as connected rather than separate criteria.

Water conservation becomes relevant wherever a project touches pitch irrigation or drainage. Stormwater harvesting and water sensitive urban design are increasingly common inclusions in these applications, and mentioning them signals that the project has been considered past the build phase.

Material selection costs little to plan for but is often overlooked. Specifying recycled or locally sourced materials, such as recycled crushed concrete or brick in pavement works, demonstrates that environmental impact was factored into the design stage rather than added retrospectively.

Involve your designer before your grant writer

Applications drafted after the design has already been locked in tend to describe sustainability in general terms because there is nothing specific left to point to. Raising ESD as a design brief requirement early, with whichever architect, builder or facilities consultant your club engages, changes what the application has available to draw on.

Worth asking at that stage: whether the design uses NatHERS rated software for thermal performance, whether window specifications carry a WERS energy rating, and whether insulation has been costed to a standard that meaningfully reduces heating and cooling load rather than one that simply meets minimum code. A design that has already accounted for these details gives the application concrete, verifiable detail to cite, in place of a general commitment to sustainable practices that a panel is likely to have read dozens of times already.

Make the operational case alongside the environmental one

Funding panels are weighing limited money across a large number of applications, and a project that lowers the club’s own running costs through reduced energy use, water use or maintenance is a stronger financial proposition on top of being a greener one. Framing ESD initiatives in both terms, what they do for the environment and what they save the club over time, gives the panel two reasons to back the project instead of one.

This also gives smaller clubs without capital for major works a way to participate. Optimising operational and maintenance practices, through better waste management, reduced e-waste or more efficient scheduling of facility use, costs little to implement and still demonstrates the kind of considered operation that can strengthen a club’s standing in future funding rounds, even outside a capital works cycle.

Checklist before submitting

Before your next infrastructure application goes in, it is worth checking the proposal against the following:

Does the application name specific ESD initiatives rather than a general sustainability statement.
Has your designer or builder been briefed on NatHERS or WERS ratings where relevant.
Does the project address energy use, water use or material selection directly.
Have the operational savings generated by the ESD elements been costed and included.
Has Sport and Recreation Victoria’s ESD Fact Sheet, or the equivalent guidance from your state’s funding body, been referenced as evidence of alignment.

Competitive rounds like the LSIF remain competitive regardless of how well a project is framed, and none of the above guarantees an outcome. What it does is give a panel fielding requests from every code and every corner of the state a project that reads in the same language as the framework it is assessing against, which in a crowded round can be the detail that separates one application from another.

For further guidance on positioning your club’s next infrastructure application, get in touch and sign your club up to the Football Pro Directory business platform here.