Karys Staddon, Production, Data & Insight Analyst, writes on our journey calculating the carbon footprint of co-produced activities. She shares data and key insights into travel and venue emissions, highlighting the importance of data collection to drive sustainability in future projects.

At Orchestras Live, we have been monitoring our operational carbon footprint for a number of years. We’ve seen significant decreases due to changes in working habits because of the pandemic (i.e. more home working, less office use and travel), as well as increases due to our growing staff team. We’re looking at areas where we can make changes to reduce our operational carbon footprint and continue to work sustainably, but we’re aware that this is just part of the picture and that we don’t know as much about the environmental impact of our co-produced activity.

Recent Act Green 2024 research from Indigo shows that 86% of cultural audiences are worried about the climate crisis. 72% think cultural organisations have a responsibility to influence society about the climate emergency, but only 16% think cultural organisations place great importance on the role they play in the climate emergency.

We know that our partners are already thinking about their role in environmental responsibility too. In our last Needs Analysis (2023), 98% of our partners said that environmental responsibility was ‘fully’ (40%) or ‘somewhat’ (58%) a priority for them, with many reporting practical changes they were making to their approach to artistic activity as well as their operations and buildings.

To find out more about the environmental impact of the activity and projects we co-produce, we teamed up with our partners at Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Borough Council of King’s Lynn & West Norfolk to run a pilot to collect as much environmental impact data as possible from the Life of the Sea project, which took place in summer 2024.

What we did

Life of the Sea was a project devised by Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and involved musicians from OAE running workshops with 11 local primary schools and 1 SEN school across West Norfolk. The project culminated on 10 July with 2 performances at King’s Lynn Corn Exchange.

We gathered the following data and used Julie's Bicycle's Creative Climate Toolsto calculate our footprint:

• OL staff travel to attend project activity
• OAE musicians and management staff travel and hotels to deliver the project activity
• Venue emissions (including waste and water) for the culmination performance day
• Audience data (via surveys) about how far they travelled to attend the performance and what mode of transport they used

What we found out

• The total emissions were 1.98 tonnes CO2e, which would require the equivalent of approximately 32 trees to offset.
• Travel and hotel stays for the OAE musicians and management staff make up the highest contributing area to the overall emissions, which is unsurprising given that the orchestra is based in London and had quite a distance to travel. The nature of the project taking place over a couple of days necessitated hotel stays for musicians, but planning the project to take place on consecutive days eliminated the need for additional journeys. A majority (52%) of travel miles were undertaken by train travel rather than car, and an estimated 223kg CO2e was saved by car sharing.
• The next highest area was audience travel, although due to a small audience survey response rate this figure is an estimate calculated from the available data, which assumes that all audiences travelled to the venue by car with an average journey distance of 18km and a car occupancy of 2.6 people. It’s likely that this is not representative and is something we will investigate improving the accuracy of in the future.
• Venue emissions make up a relatively small proportion of the total carbon footprint for the project, though we know this is likely to look different for other venues and projects that we co-produce. Of the total 161kg CO2e from venue emissions, 90kg CO2e (70%) of electricity and gas emissions would have been used anyway to keep the venue running even if no activity was taking place, and only 38kg CO2e was used in addition for the project.
• The lowest area was OL staff working and travel, which we would expect (and hope!) to be small with only 2 team members working on co-producing this project.
  

Our key takeaways

Through this exercise, we were pleased to learn more from OAE about their approach to sustainability and how much they think about mitigating their impact. They combined the Life of the Sea activity with other projects – a CPD training session in York and a separate project in nearby Attleborough – to reduce the distance that staff and musicians would be required to travel. By combing these projects, a further 177kg CO2e emissions were added for hotel stays for OAE management and musicians to stay on for the Attleborough project starting the day after the Life of the Sea project. However, this mitigated 683kg CO2e of travel that would have been required if the projects took place at different times. With the additional 223kg CO2e saved through car sharing, this resulted in a net saving of 729kg CO2e overall – more than a third of the emissions of the whole Life of the Sea project. It’s fantastic that our partners are taking this strategic approach to getting the most out of projects.

This has been just the first step, and we still don’t know enough to draw conclusions or look at trends yet, and we acknowledge there have been challenges and gaps in the data we’ve collected. It’s been a valuable step forward for us though, and is helping us to have more conversations both as a staff team and with our partners about where we can do better. We’ve committed to sharing helpful resources with our partners, like this Green Working from Home Guide from the Arts Marketing Association.

It’s posed a lot more questions than it’s answered, and we’re keen to see how the carbon footprint picture looks in different places where we work and to understand more about the challenges our partners and the wider sector are facing in this area of environmental sustainability.