Golf course operators face a dual challenge: With approximately 16,000 courses nationwide competing for players, climate volatility now threatens operational viability. Courses investing in climate resilience and water management are gaining competitive advantage, while those ignoring these pressures risk course closures and revenue loss.
Historically, golf courses gained competitive advantage through better clubhouses and exclusive memberships. That playbook’s changing. Rising temperatures and extreme weather now force courses to choose: adapt their infrastructure or risk closures. Climate resilience isn’t just environmentally responsible—it’s financially necessary.
Courses that invest in water systems, drainage infrastructure, and heat-tolerant turf aren’t just appeasing eco-conscious players. As PBI-Gordon Corporation explains below, they’re reducing operational costs, staying open when competitors shut down, and building a differentiated brand.
Achieving Water Security
Water efficiency improvements at golf courses aren’t new—the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) documented significant progress between 2004 and 2024. However, the pace of adoption is accelerating. Courses that lagged in implementing these systems now face operational and financial pressure to catch up.
The ASHS report cites the 2 million-plus acres of turf managed by golf courses nationally, noting that increased public scrutiny and regulatory oversight are major motivators for this reduction in water consumption across the industry. In drought-prone regions like the American Southwest, proactive management has driven an additional 16.9% decline in water usage since 2020 alone, the report notes. In addition to pursuing water-use efficiency to court environmentally conscious customers, courses are doing so for compliance reasons and to cope with climate conditions they experience.
Researchers even point out that courses are having to adapt water strategies because their reliance on recycled water for turf irrigation is competing with heightened demand for the same resources from other industries. Those that fall behind the curve here risk exposing themselves to disruption to normal irrigation practices, which in turn risk compromising playability and thus disappointing customers, so it’s an interconnected issue.
Conversely, the courses implementing advanced systems are shifting heavily toward data-informed water use. The ASHS study highlights a massive uptick in the adoption of handheld soil moisture sensors and precision irrigation audits, allowing for flexible irrigation schedules that defy the rigid approaches of the past.
Exploring Out-of-Play Repurposing Options
While golf courses can sprawl across many acres, one recent study recommends that, since up to 70% of the area is classed as out-of-play, meaning not intrinsic to the game itself, repurposing this land rather than maintaining it rigorously is an ecological imperative. Specifically, it’s recommended that courses allow out-of-play regions to be rewilded, enabling them to support a wider diversity of wildlife and plant life, with knock-on advantages including improved pollination and a reduction in the negative effects of the urban sprawl which surrounds many courses.
As with water conservation efforts, the competitive advantage of this strategy is one both of business reputation among eco-conscious customers, and of cost-efficiency. When fewer acres need to be intensively managed, courses reduce annual expenses for fertilizer, pesticide applications, equipment maintenance, and labor—savings that compound significantly across multi-year operational cycles.
Accepting Long-Term Climate Risks
The day-to-day advantages of golf’s attentiveness to climate resilience are further supported by the competitive strategy that takes a long view on the need for hard climate risk mitigation. A 2022 paper on how climate change is already impacting sport, and will continue to do so going forward, singles out outdoor sports as especially vulnerable.
Similarly, a golf-specific piece of research clearly shows that while golf is doing well from a participation point of view, course closures have exceeded new openings consistently over the past two decades. The solution, researchers argue, is to aim for a strategic, gradual loss of land that’s not economically or environmentally viable to maintain, rather than the permanent loss from course closures due to a lack of climate resilience in the underlying land management approach.
Courses are investing in resilient infrastructure, such as advanced subsurface drainage, heat- and drought- tolerant turfgrass hybrids, and structural flood barriers to avoid multi-week closures following severe weather events. In an industry where fixed operational costs run continuously, staying open while local competitors are closed due to storm damage or turf burn is a significant competitive advantage.
