This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Congratulations to our Green Arts Community

150 Scottish arts organisations are now members of the Green Arts Initiative, gaining tailored advice and support, free resources, an annual conference and member connections across the country! Their commitment to environmental sustainability is exemplary in the arts sector and we’re proud to highlight their work.

We’ve Come a Long Way

The Green Arts Initiative began as the ‘Green Venues Guide’: a pamphlet designed to offer sustainability advice to venues at theEdinburgh Festival Fringe. Over several iterations, it has developed into the form it takes today: a networked community of artists, arts organisations, companies and venues working individually and collaboratively to reduce their impact on the environment, and think more creatively about engagement with sustainability.

Beginning with 23 members at the end of 2013, the membership of the community has increased as issues of environmental sustainability, and their relevance and opportunity offering to the arts, has become of greater prominence. The launch of Creative Scotland’s ‘Environment’ Connecting Theme and carbon emissions reporting requirements for Regularly Funded Organisations, the 2015 United Nations COP in Paris and the surrounding ArtCOP andArtCOPScotland movements, have emphasised the important role the arts have to play.

With community members from across the country, and across art forms, sustainability activities range from inspiring (and aspiring) environmental policies, to artistic programming directly about climate change, to creative forms of engaging staff and audiences in environmental efforts. No two of our organisations are the same, but sharing knowledge and experiences with other members is a big part of being in the community: communicating and provoking new ideas and efficient use of resources.

The Next Steps

2015 was a big year for the GAI, and we’re hoping that the rest 2016 will prove to be even bigger! We’re planning a second annual conference, more member resources, and continuing to grow our community. Become a member of the Green Arts Initiative to be kept up to date with these developments!

The Green Arts Initiative is an interactive community of Scottish organisations committed to growing the environmental sustainability of the arts. There are already 150 members across all regions of the country and range of art form: from large-scale producing theatres, to independent art galleries, working on everything from carbon emissions reduction to creating Green Teams from within their staff.

Free to join, you can find out more about the initiative and its members, and join the community, on our Green Arts Initiative project page.

The post Green Arts Initiative reaches 150 Members! appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

On Friday April 22, a new guide showcasing environmental sustainability initiatives across Scottish and UK music festivals was launched at Wide Days music industry convention in Edinburgh. Alongside music hustings and band showcases, Creative Carbon Scotland sponsored a panel discussion to explore questions of the environmental responsibility of the live music sector.

Joined by organisers of Scottish music festivals HebCelt Fest, Knockengorroch and Electric Fields, and Claire O’Neill (Co-founder and Director, A Greener Festival), this is the first environmentally-focused panel of its kind at Wide Days. We’ll be taking the chance to learn about some of the great work already being done by participating festivals and will discuss opportunities for a flexible support network to further this work in Scotland.

The guide, an outcome of a year-long research project – Fields of Green, summarises key research findings and next steps to research including:

• Environmental impacts of UK music festivals as outlined in the recent report The Show Must Go On;
• Best practices and challenges of six Scottish music festivals;
• Results from an audience survey conducted at a Scottish music festival in 2015;
• Tips, resources and a call to action for Scottish music festivals to get involved in the Fields of Green project!

Download the Fields of Green next steps guide here!

If you’re interested in finding out more, take a look at our blog from the recent Green Events & Innovations conference in London, showcasing socially and environmentally engaged activity across music festivals internationally. We even made a sneaky appearance to share the great collaborative working model shared between the twelve Edinburgh Festivals to reduce their environmental impacts and engage with artists and audiences in this area.

Fields of Green is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, University of the West of Scotland, Lancaster University and Creative Carbon Scotland. The project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The post Sustainable Music Festivals Guide Published appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

We often think of art and science as being almost opposing disciplines. Yet at Creative Carbon Scotland we find ourselves benefiting from opportunities presented by bringing artists together with scientists, engineers and technicians to explore approaches to dealing with climate change. Artists can often respond with enthusiasm and a novel viewpoint to problems which seem intractable to the problem solvers while scientist can bolster authenticity in a work of art. Our own recent project ArtCOP Scotland, during which artists responded to the December Paris Climate Summit, revealed the myriad of ways in which artistic practices could help to discuss and explore our relationship with the social-political issues surrounding climate change.

The Traverse recently hosted an interesting example of this approach with a joint production from the Traverse Theatre and the University of Edinburgh Schools of Engineering and Informatics of Data and the Future City.

A group of research staff at the department of Informatics at Edinburgh University were approaching the task of gathering research proposals. Faced with the prospect of organising yet another workshop along the usual lines which would come up with the usual ideas, a chance suggestion that they ‘talk to someone at the Traverse’ culminated in a dramatized presentation of 11 possible scenarios.

Each of the scenarios dealt with a different possible aspect of living in a future version of Edinburgh where personal data was being used to provide services for (and control of) the population. The academics involved each wrote a short dialog which explored possible uses of ‘Big data’ ranging from medical services (e-doctor) to punishments for minor offending (off-points) with benefits and disadvantages explored and discussed.

The dialogs, voiced by 6 actors, reading direct from the scripts, were thought provoking and ranged from tragic to comic and engaged the audience in a way that a list of workshop inspired research ideas never could.

The process of writing, dramatizing and presenting the scenarios took place over 3 half days and was both inspiring and difficult for both the scientists and the artists but illustrated how the arts can provide a voice for a wide range of communities who struggle to communicate and audiences who would otherwise have limited opportunities to hear diverse messages.

Creative Carbon Scotland runs a range of projects to bring together the arts and environmental sustainability. Find out more about our work here.

The post Data and the Future City: a dramatic exploration appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Over three years ago now, I wrote a blog about why anyone investing in a pension – and that means most of us, with auto-enrolment meaning that all employers will soon have to provide a workplace pension – should consider a fund that avoids investing in fossil fuels. A recent report brings this up to date and makes even more stark predictions.

The report, published in the highly respected academic journal Nature Climate Change, spells out the risks. When I was writing back in 2013, my point was that as climate change became more urgent, companies whose worth was based on their fossil fuel assets would lose value as people realised that the oil and gas wells, coal mines and tar sands they owned would never be exploited as fossil fuels would become too expensive or illegal to use. This is still the case, and a speaker at a discussion after the Paris Climate Change talks suggested that one reason why Saudi Arabia is not curtailing its oil production to raise the price, as it would have in the past, is because it knows that in future its oil will be harder to sell, so it might as well pump as much as it can now.

The risk today is wider. The report argues that the impact on global financial assets of 21^st century climate change is equal to 1.8% of the total, or $2.5trillion, assuming that we take a ‘business as usual’ approach to climate change – ie we don’t make any changes to the way in which we run the world. However, this is just the lower end of the estimate and in the worst scenarios it rises to nearly 17% of the global financial assets or $24trillion. These are substantial sums.

The losses would be caused by severe weather events, and the damage done to buildings, infrastructure and land used for agriculture; and by the reduction in earnings and presumably productivity for people affected by higher temperatures, drought and other climate impacts. In recent decades, there has been a great deal of high value building on relatively low lying land – areas like Florida for example, or the bank of the Thames. Flooding caused by sea level rise and storm surges; therefore, now has much greater financial impact than would have been the case in the past when land at risk of flooding was routinely less developed.

The report argues that taking action to contain climate change to below 2°C will reduce the potential losses significantly:

‘Including mitigation costs, the present value of global financial assets is an expected 0.2% higher when warming is limited to no more than 2◦C, compared with business as usual. The 99^th percentile [ie the worst case scenario] is 9.1% higher. Limiting warming to no more than 2◦C makes financial sense to risk-neutral investors—and even more so to the risk averse.’ (Nature Climate Change 4 April 2016. DOI: 10.10138)

So what should the pension investor, or perhaps more importantly the arts manager who is setting up an auto enrolment scheme for their company’s employees, do? The answer must be to avoid investments in companies with interests in fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal. Not only will their assets become less valuable, as Carbon Tracker continues to demonstrate, but their continued development of the fossil fuel reserves that they own will also affect the wider portfolio of shares and assets that pension funds invest in. There are numerous pension funds that avoid environmentally problematic investments – Aviva’s Sustainable Futures funds are just some of the best known (and this isn’t a recommendation – I’m not qualified for that!).

There’s another angle to this. I signed a letter that was published in the Guardian on Monday urging Hartwig Fischer, the new Director of the British Museum, to drop sponsorship by BP. Liberate Tate, Platform and Art Not Oil have been very successful at raising this issue and apparently having some success: BP will no longer be sponsoring the Tate. Their approach has been political, artistic and fun, demonstrating that art and politics can happily go to bed together. Similarly the divestment campaign at Edinburgh University continues to make waves – and to be fair, seems to have had an effect. And Glasgow University was the first in Europe to disinvest. Things are happening.

Many years ago, Scotland faced the poll tax before England and our protests were a bit too restrained – nothing happened. Shortly after there was more… robust protest in England, Thatcher and the poll tax were chucked out. Is it time we in the arts became a bit less restrained here about fossil fuel?

The post Ben’s Blog: Disinvestment appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Aimed primarily at green-field/open-air music festivals, and addressing the theme of ‘challenging the status quo’, the event covered everything from the formal mechanisms for change, innovative examples, and the different dimensions of sustainability through which festivals can make an impact.

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Two active initiatives leading the outdoor music festival sector towards environmental sustainability were presented publicly at the conference. A Greener Festival, having run their successful sustainability-assessment awards scheme for a decade, relaunched their application and assessor recruitment and training for their award. Applied for annually, the award rates festivals on their commitments and actions, and helps adapt and continuously refine their behaviour towards environmental sustainability.

This was followed by Chris Johnston (Powerful Thinking, Shambala Festival, Kambe Events), who emphasised the message of “Alone I can go faster, together we can go further”, when discussing The Show Must Go On report (created as a festival industry response to the Paris COP that took place in December).

Chris particularly urged those festivals present to sign up to the Festival Vision:2025 pledge, which encourages those committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 50% over the next 9 years. Audience comments and questions around the pledge were varied, with those festivals more established in their sustainability efforts unsure as to how to reduce their power consumption further, and those heavily reliant on generator power requiring significant management support to make the changes suggested.

However, presentations on Smart Power Plans for fuel optimisation and the how hybrid generators can provide uninterrupted power supply at festivals and in the developing world (Tim Benson, Firefly Clean Energy), provided rational, tested and current opportunities for realising these goals.

Tech innovations

Inspired by the ‘disrupting complacency’ element of the conference, there was a focus on new ideas and innovation, several of which seemed to co-incidentally address the issue of human waste at outdoor sites. Managing to avoid toilet humour, Jonathan Winfield of Bristol Bioenergy Centre excited the group with his explanation of the major scientific and practical advancements in urine-powered fuel cells, producing enough electricity to light their test toilet at Glastonbury Festival in 2015. Hamish Skermer (A Natural Event) also regaled the group with the various tribulations of beginning composting toilets at his own festival, claiming: “Port-a-loos are designed for building sites, not music festivals!”.

Interpreting sustainability

Consistent across the conference was the variety through which the presenting individuals and festivals approached different dimensions of sustainability. As well as the innovative technological developments, the speakers highlighted the areas of:

• Society: Throughout the event, speakers from across the panel sessions highlighted the more social good and non-profit motivations of festivals and how these had typically been more explicit in the past. Particularly relevant to the arts and sustainability, WE LOVE GREEN’s upcycled ‘scenography’ opportunity for emerging artists combined professional opportunities with the circular economy. Panellists also highlighted the concept of festivals performing social good, and those working in the events and festivals sector having significant transferrable skills to offer – for example, in application to working at refugee camps with honed abilities in generator power, temporary structures, mass catering and working with people.
• Behaviour: The role of festivals in affecting audience behaviour change is a hot topic, and Livvy Drake of Shambala discussed the positive and negative reception the festival faced when announcing their plan to go ‘meat-free’ in their catering. There was a conflict too between those with differing beliefs around audience engagement in behaviour change initiatives: whereas Steve Muggeridge’s Green Gathering background led him to appreciate the democratic and audience-demanded sustainability adaptations, Rob Scully (Glastonbury) explained the festival’s internal process for developing stainless-steel re-useable cups, and the executive decision, research and development taken by the festival to ensure that the process was well implemented in its first instance.

Overall, the event provided a snapshot of the varied and international avenues to increasing the positive contributions festivals can make to their societies and the natural world. Never before have we learnt about koalas, fuel cells, stainless steel and Japanese ski resorts in the one day!

At the Greener Events and Innovations conference, Gemma and Catriona also presented on their learning around working in collaboration with respect to cultural and music festivals. Click here to find out more about our Fields of Green project, the Green Arts Initiative and the work of the Edinburgh Festivals.

Photo: Shambala by Marc Reck via Flickr Creative Commons

The post The Greener Events and Innovations Conference appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Powered by WPeMatico

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

I made two trips in February to two very different conferences. The Happy Museum Project’s Happy and Green: Connecting Sustainability and Well Being in London aimed to ‘draw out the connections between Sustainability and Wellbeing in support of individual, institutional and societal resilience – and the particular role that culture can play’. The keynote speaker was (Lord) Gus O’Donnell, formerly Cabinet Secretary and Head of the British Civil Service and (among other things) Chair of the Behavioural Insights Team Advisory Board at the Cabinet Office (otherwise known as the ‘Nudge unit’, as it basically follows the approach of Thaler and Sunstein’s book Nudge, about behavioural economics). Also speaking was Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Network.

Gus O’Donnell is an economist, and it shows. He spoke very lucidly about well-being and why it matters, how it can be measured and so on. I enjoyed his talk, but it was very focused on individuals – less about the environment that people operate in and that they have to respond to, and in the end rather simplistic. I spoke to him during the break and he wasn’t a great listener, shall I say: I just heard again what I’d heard in the talk.

Rob Hopkins gave a very inspiring talk about the Transition Network and what they’d done in Totnes, where it started. What they do is amazing and there are some lovely things going on in Totnes, so worth following that up. There are also at least 14 official Transition groups in Scotland, so there may be one near you. Transition always feels a bit small scale to me: I’m never quite sure that all the Transition Towns are ever going to join up enough to make a big change. That’s their thing, though: it’s all based on Think Global, Act Local. Inspiring. As is Tony Butler, the Founder and Chair of the Happy Museum Project.

February was the planet’s warmest seasonally adjusted month on record. Ben has some proof out on the terrace in Salzburg.

Very different was a trip to Salzburg (by cheap train!) for the Salzburg Global Seminar’s 561^st session: Beyond Green: The arts as a catalyst for sustainability. It was a great experience, simply because of the quality of the other people there: from the Director of the Ecologic Institute, a sustainability and energy think-tank in Berlin to an ethnobotanist, agrifood-ist and activist from Greece (via Edinburgh), to a live-wire from Jakarta in Indonesia, doing extraordinary things with communities, working from the bottom up. Look at the list of participants to get the idea. We worked hard – 9am to 10pm most days – ate well and slept in a fantastic schloss.

I’m still processing the things I learned and heard. Some were familiar, others new. I was very taken by American ‘civic artist’ Frances Whitehead’s keynote speech in which she touched upon ‘What Artists Know’, her thoughts about the skills, competencies and attributes of artists and what they do. She summarises it well (and more deeply than me here): artists are responsive, they make the visible invisible, they evaluate and analyse. This is central to thinking about how the arts and artists can contribute to action not only on climate change, but other areas of work that are perhaps normally outside the arts. One thing that Frances doesn’t mention is art’s ability – no, almost its requirement – to fruitfully hold in tension ideas and concepts that are at odds with each other. Discussing the seminar with thinker and journalist, Joyce McMillan, after I came back she reminded me of this idea. Whilst politics and other areas either want one idea to ‘win’ or seek compromise to get consensus, the best art sings when the ideas bounce off each other. As a theatre director, the best cast is one with lots of competing opinions – my job is to knit them into an energised whole.

Frances’ list doesn’t include something else she mentioned in her talk: artists use metis – the Greek term meaning ‘strategic knowledge, based in practice’. Artists are clever, cunning – they get things done, but not just out of a general wiliness but one aiming to achieve within a framework and a set of values built on practical and theoretical knowledge. Frances’ own work, using her practice to renew American cities devastated by population shift and post-industrial decline, not only stretches her metis to the full, but also points to how art and artists can contribute to addressing climate change.

Postscript: One gloomy aspect of Salzburg was when I was asked to facilitate a group of the European participants. The other groups covering Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the Americas etc had positive things to say when they fed back but the Europe group was very downbeat, pessimistic about the future and slightly fractious. The issues of the precarious EU, worries about attitudes to migration, Brexit and so on hung over us. It felt very much that we were the old world and facing a difficult future compared to the other regions.

The post Ben’s Blog: Happy Museum and Salzburg appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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