We've always cared about our social and environmental impact, always trying to produce our shows as sustainably as we can. We've long had an environmental policy, and always tried to reduce our impacts and our footprint.

But in truth, it was all a bit ad-hoc, a bit disjointed and, to be disappointingly honest, never as effective we'd have liked. This really hit home when we joined the first cohort of the Accelerator Programme - a creative climate leadership programme for the cultural sector, run by Julie's Bicycle and supported by ACE. The Accelerator kicked off at the end of 2018 - just after the IPCC published their special report on the staggering difference between 1.5ºC warming and 2ºC. They made clear that time was of the essence - we had just 10 years to get going and make big reductions to our carbon emissions, and those emissions must fall to zero by 2050 - now only 3 decades away. It was also just after Extinction Rebellion had first reared its head, blocking Parliament Square in London to launch their Declaration of Rebellion.

Science Based Targets

It's hard for a small, under-resourced company like us to stay fully focussed on sustainability in that final, over-worked push of actually getting the show up, and it's time for a new, joined-up approach. We need a grand, overarching target that's easy to hold at the front of everything we do, every day. It needs to be meaningful, and we need to be able to check how we're doing against it easily and immediately. But what should it be?

Every time I try to think about it I've found myself drawn back to the Science Based Targets initiative. The idea is simple - align your targets with the Paris Agreement and the IPCC's 1.5ºC report, and you've automatically aimed for what the science unanimously tells us is necessary. Avoid distractions and accidental greenwash. Simple. Except it isn't. The 65 page SBTi manual attests to that.

The science behind these targets basically says that only a small amount more carbon can be released into the atmosphere before the risks become too high. That's pretty straightforward - there's a carbon budget that we have to stick to, and we know how to run a budget. But hang on, the science tells us the global carbon budget - how much of that can the UK use? How much of that can we give to the theatre sector, and how much of theatre's allocation does Metta get?

Net-Zero

If we knew how much carbon we had in our budget we could decide when and how we wanted to use it over the next few years, just like we do with our funding. But there are so many ways to split up the pie, how do we decide how to do it? Do we base our allocation evenly across the globe? Spread equally amongst the population? By importance of the sector we work in?

Perhaps we could make life easier for ourselves. Our emissions are basically tiny, so perhaps it's enough just to say that we need to eliminate them all, as quickly as possible.

But how quick would be acceptable? We could follow the UK's 2050 net-zero target, or perhaps we have a moral obligation to go much faster than that here in the UK, the birthplace of our addiction to fossil fuels - Extinction Rebellion demands net-zero in the UK by 2025.

Breakdown

Let's take a look at where our carbon actually comes from. Julie’s Bicycle have recently updated their Creative Industry Green carbon calculator, making it easier and more useful for a touring company like us. In the wider business world emissions are generally classified as Scope 1: Direct Emissions (fuel we burn ourselves); Scope 2: Indirect Emissions (electricity & heating we buy); Scope 3: Value Chain Emissions (eg. things we buy, artist travel, show transport and set disposal).

We must remember to include all of these, but almost all of our emissions fall under scope 3, so it's easiest to think in terms of our activities. This chart shows the rough breakdown of where our emissions come from.

Some areas have technical solutions or artistic choices to change what we use or reduce the need to use it, but some do not. Travel and haulage for example, around three quarters of our emissions, are a basic necessity for a touring company, and we already basically only take the train. Of course we've thought long and hard about going digital - just like everyone else during the coronavirus lockdown - but when we finally emerge into a new post-covid normal we're fully expecting live theatre to play a vital part in our cultural lives.

You can read how we plan to decarbonise our work in our plan for net-zero emissions across 2020, and Julie's Bicycle have a veritable library of useful resources which you can draw on for yourself. There are many areas we can practically reduce our emissions, but there are others we simply cant eliminate completely yet, without shutting the doors and stopping making theatre.

Offsetting

So this is where that little word 'net' in front of the 'zero' comes in - by actively removing some carbon from the atmosphere, we can discount the same amount from our total emissions.

Suddenly our challenge is a little more manageable. We only generate around 10 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, so we'll eliminate as much of that as we can, and offset what we can't avoid. It's the only way we can keep making our work if we care about the environment like we say we do.

There are plenty of options out there for offsetting, but of course some are better than others. Luckily though, like most things sustainable in the arts, Julie's Bicycle have a fact sheet.

The gist of the problem is twofold:

1. If it's too easy to just pay someone else to take the problem off our hands, then we're less likely to do the hard work of making actual reductions.

2. Even if those emissions really are unavoidable, and so offsetting them is legitimate, it's hard to be sure that the offset is both genuine and permanent.

A good approach is to keep our offsetting local, which makes it easier to be sure that our offsets are genuine and permanent because of the fairly robust standards here in the UK (like The Woodland Carbon Code). It also has the helpful side effect of being more expensive - we don't want to be too easy on ourselves! We also want to encourage everyone on the team to engage with what we're doing and why, so we're also going to try to make time and space to plant a tree for every production - a symbolic act rather than one to offset emissions (a young tree only soaks up about 5kg of carbon per year from the atmosphere).

Back Pay

We've been working on reducing our emissions for years, and we've decided to mark that now by not only offsetting all of our unavoidable emissions from this year onwards, we'll also cancel out all of our last four years of emissions at the same time (because that's as long as we have decent data for).

Reaching Out

Our footprint is about the same as an average UK citizens', and so by far the biggest impact we could have on emissions comes from our influence rather than our own reductions. We are a theatre company after all! The arts are so often at the forefront of social change - both holding up a mirror to society, but also as Brecht once put it, "a hammer with which to shape it."

I like to think we're subtler than a hammer, but we have always wanted to change the world! So every one of our shows now has some form of connection to the climate crisis - ranging from the very concept for the show, a character's grappling with climate anxiety, a subtle nod to modelling a lower-carbon future or the full blown painting of a future dystopia.

Sustainability has always been part of our raison d'etre, but we've taken time to fully embed it into our business plan, and we've learned an awful lot about how to approach difficult strategic issues in the process. Which is why we've just launched Metta Green - our Creative Climate Consultancy aimed at helping other organisations engage with their environmental sustainability and to develop bespoke, practical solutions to their specific needs.