If you’re a Coldplay fan, you’ll probably have seen the news about their efforts to cut the CO2 emissions of their Music of the Spheres tour. It was widely reported that lead singer Chris Martin arrived for their recent concert in Cardiff by train, in sharp contrast to other A-list performers, who continue their business-as-usual travel arrangements.
Why am I telling you this?
Not because, we had Chris Martin perform at our Festival (we can dream), but because here at the IoIC, we’re #TeamColdplay.
As we announced earlier in 2023, at IoIC HQ, we’ve pledged to do all we can to reduce our own carbon emissions and embrace sustainability.
Measuring the carbon footprint of our 2023 Festival was therefore a given.
We started thinking about sustainability and the Festival back in 2022, when we were looking for venues. One of the reasons we chose Tewinbury Farm was they do everything with sustainability at the heart, from the way they operate, their ambitions to become net-zero and all their locally sourced food.
In the lead-up we also thought about event collateral – what materials could we produce that we could use again, and we also chose an AV team local to the area.
Then, with 230 attendees hosted across the two-day event, we wanted to live our values and do what we could to make the event as sustainable as it could be. We’ve not measured the carbon emissions of our events before, so had no prior data to help us benchmark.
However, in our view, this wasn’t a valid reason for not getting started.
We worked with event: decision to help us calculate the carbon emissions generated by the Festival. Evaluating components including travel, transportation, accommodation, food and beverages, energy, materials and waste, we were able to see where the bulk of our emissions were created.
We are now in a position to offset those emissions and have chosen to support the planting of trees across the UK, mainly in school locations, helping to educate children and support wildlife habitats. Not only good for the environment, but helping the community too and, hopefully, inspiring a future generation (when I explained to my 8 year old what we had done, he was genuinely really chuffed and thought it was ‘cool’ – high praise indeed).
How did we do?
More than offsetting though, the results showed us there’s work to be done. Although the data positioned the Festival in the 37th percentile of conference format events, which is encouraging (measured on a per-delegate basis), we know there’s much more we can do to create events that bring people together while minimising environmental impact.
As we start thinking about preparations for our 2024 Festival, there are key actions we will take.
The first relates to catering.
Undertaking this assessment helped us see we can do more to provide non-meat-based food options. This was also the feedback our Festival Goers gave us too – they want to see these options. As we embark on our journey down the pathway towards sustainability, we’re learning just how damaging industrial-scale livestock farming is to the environment. Journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot has written extensively about this in his 2022 book Regenesis.
Moving forward
So, moving forward we’ll be sure to introduce more plant-based food options to the events we plan. We have to reduce our intake of meat products for planetary degradation to slow.
Another action item on our list relates to travel arrangements.
While we appreciate the effort you all make to travel from across the country to our events, we wonder what we can do to encourage more sustainable arrangements. Many of you reported the joy of meeting new people at the Festival, so we will be actively encourage more lift-sharing and co-travel for 2024’s Festival, trying to connect our Festival Goers before the event to see if these arrangements are possible.
And when we chose a venue for 2025 (we are already looking into this), again we will ensure their sustainability values align with ours.
It is, of course, early days and we need much more dialogue around this.
One thing is clear though. Getting started on our sustainability journey is an imperative and we want to practice ‘working out loud’ – so we can all learn faster together.
