Theatre & Environmental Sustainability

By Will Reynolds, Artistic Director of Metta Theatre

We've all read the papers, watched the news, seen the photos. We know about Global Warming, we know about the Climate & Ecological Crisis. We know it in our heads, but do we know it in our hearts?

I recently spoke at UK Theatre seminar on Business Resilience to talk about the Climate & Ecological Emergency, which gave me an excellent opportunity to ask myself whether we know the crisis in our organisations?

As I talked about in my last blog, we’ve been part of Julie’s Bicycle’s sustainability leadership Accelerator Programme for the last year, working with a group of other companies and receiving houses to improve our own sustainability and encourage the rest of the touring theatre sector to do the same. But it’s recently been becoming clearer to me that this work to reduce our emissions is only half the story - albeit a vital half. The Carbon Literacy Project puts a good deal of emphasis on the effects of Global Heating, alongside a thorough understanding of its causes, of course, and it was while training with them at HOME in Manchester that I first started to think seriously about our industry's need for resilience as our environment becomes harsher and more extreme.

The world needs to decarbonise fast if we're to stand a chance of meeting the Paris Agreement's aim of keeping Global Heating to 1.5ºC. And alongside that decarbonisation we need to get ready for what a 1.5ºC world will feel like. There would be no theatre on a dead planet, but we need to make sure that there is theatre on a hotter planet.

Last year saw unprecedented flooding in the UK, something that's only going to happen more as our planet warms and weather becomes more extreme. Some new research in 2019 highlighted to me the flood risk we as an industry face - the pink areas on the map below show where floods are expected to hit every year in a business as usual emissions scenario. There are several theatres that would be seriously affected - to name a few: Old Vic, Young Vic, Menier Chocolate Factory, Southbank Centre, National Theatre, The Bridge… And that's just London, the story is similar all over the UK.

Hotter summers won't just mean more air conditioning and corresponding higher electricity bills - we all know audience numbers drop when the sun shines and BBQs come out. Our touring system is incredibly vulnerable to extreme weather - just a couple of years ago the "Beast from the East" came close to stopping one of my company Metta Theatre's tours from getting started, as the truck carrying the set for our Circus Little Mermaid ploughed on through the snow on the way to our opening venue, Theatre By The Lake.

So I come back to my initial question - We know about the Crisis in our heads, but do we know it in our hearts? Do we know it in the hearts' of our organisations?

Do our business plans make us resilient to a rapidly intensifying climate? Have we really taken on board that we must urgently cut our emissions to zero? That we can't do that and continue with Business as Usual? What will our new business models look like in this new world?

Science Based Targets

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has helpfully laid out an 'emissions pathway' for us to follow, and the previous government enshrined the 2050 Net Zero target in UK law. The pathway shown below, from the IPCC's special 1.5ºC report in 2018, shows global emissions peaking this year, then falling dramatically to half of current levels by 2030, and zero-ing out in 2050.

All ACE funded NPO's must now have an Environmental Action Plan. I would go further, and say that we must all put a plan in place, and those plans must include Science Based Targets to reduce our emissions in line with this IPCC pathway: ie at least 50% cuts by 2030, 100% cuts by 2050.

The Business Case for Emissions Reductions

Our businesses need to be resilient to prosper in a more extreme climate, and we need to play our part in reducing emissions to avoid any global heating that we can. There's a moral case for that which I hope is obvious when you see fires tear across Australia, ravaging wildlife and destroying communities; when hurricanes strike Mozambique, or North America, or the Bahamas; when drought brings modern mega cities to their knees in India. But there's also a hard-nosed business case.

As mentioned above, regular ACE funding is already dependant on environmental reporting and policy, and their annual environmental reports tell a strong story of environmental engagement playing a strong part in helping to access other funding too.

Many emissions reductions come from simple efficiencies, and using resources more efficiently generally saves money! ACE reports £16.5 million saved over the last 7 years by NPO's deploying energy saving measures which have brought 35% emissions reductions.

Government policy will ramp up (even if it doesn't look like it here in the UK today) and so there are parts of our operations that we need to look at now, so that we don't get left behind when big changes to our economy happen around us - fossil fuels will become more expensive, and renewables cheaper. Landfill will become more difficult, and therefore expensive, as we move towards a more circular economy. It never pays to be playing catch up with technology.

There are other benefits too - ACE reports that "environmental practice and carbon literacy are being linked to improvements in other organisational priorities, including team morale and strategic decision-making".

And in this sector we live and die by our reputations. Within the sector, my company Metta has formed several exciting new partnerships recently, directly because we explicitly started conversations about sustainability. And society tends to put arts organisations on a bit of a moral pedestal; people will soon notice if we're dragging feet and there is already huge public demand for radical action, with 70% of those polled by the Independent recently backing a much more ambitious net zero target of 2030.

Beyond Our Own Emissions

Arguably the arts have an even bigger part to play than other industries - it is our raison d'etre to communicate with our audiences, and so we have a unique opportunity - responsibility even - to talk about the crisis, it's mitigation and the need for adaptation.

And that's where the arts come in - the arts, and I think theatre in particular, is uniquely placed to transform the conversation around climate change and translate it into action. One of the main functions of the arts is to hold up a mirror to society - and the influence of the arts and our ability to bring about culture change are enormous.

That doesn't mean that every show needs to be directly about climate breakdown! But perhaps we do need to start modelling on stage what our future world might look like, or what we might like it to look like. As the climate crisis becomes ever more present in people's minds the expectation of dealing with it in their arts will only grow.

And beyond the environment featuring on-stage, our audiences trust us, and so we have a unique opportunity to engage with them off stage as well. Removing plastic cups from the bar is not really that hard, and a great conversation starter. Publishing your carbon footprint, and what you're doing to reduce it, is a great way to engage your audience with your core values, not just which touring show is in the building this week.

We can share and collaborate with partners, and encourage other artists to engage. We can highlight local initiatives, and support local groups with space for meetings and events. Plant gardens, house bees on the roof - in short, we can do more of what we do best - we can start conversations.

Join A Movement

To finish off, I want to make a plea - a plea to take action, to make your organisation more resilient, to set science based targets, to talk about the crisis and your efforts against it.

And a plea to do it together: Cultures Declares Emergency has given us an easy way to work together, to share the burden, and to be bold.

Check them out, join the declaration, and start taking action!

A great place to find relevant, practical sustainability guides and in depth case studies is Julie’s Bicycles’s Resource Hub.