Walk the Plank: Green Space Dark Skies Sustainability Impact Report
Walk the Plank: Green Space Dark Skies Sustainability Impact Report
By
Walk the Plank
Green Space Dark Skies (GSDS) was Walk the Plank's ambitious cross-sector collaborative project commissioned by UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK in 2022. The project put environmental sustainability at its heart, achieving some major sustainability successes and impressive carbon savings. The Sustainability Impact Report report shares best practice with organisations delivering outdoor events.
Green Space Dark Skies (GSDS) was Walk the Plank's ambitious cross-sector collaborative project commissioned by UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK in 2022. The project put environmental sustainability at its heart, achieving some major sustainability successes and impressive carbon savings.
To meet the challenge of the climate emergency, Green Space Dark Skies employed a collective and collaborative approach. The open sharing of knowledge and experience was vital to establishing a new working culture where sustainability was as central to the event production as health and safety.
Green Space Dark Skies as a large-scale national project provided the resources and partners to embed sustainability from the planning, delivery and measurement stages towards achieving ambitious targets across both the social and environmental aspects of the project. The scope of data collection was vast including energy, transport, materials, food and beverage, waste, accessibility, diversity, and digital.
The aims were to leave no trace and be climate positive, ultimately removing more carbon from the atmosphere than it produced.
The report contains the carbon data for the entire project, shares learnings and innovations gathered on the way and does not shy away from some of the challenges faced.
This Executive Summary is intended to give an overview of sustainability practice across the whole Green Space Dark Skies project, produced by Walk the Plank, and summarise key findings from the full Sustainability Impact Report. A core principle of the Green Space Dark Skies Sustainability Strategy was to be transparent about the project’s sustainability journey from end to end.
The report therefore not only outlines the final carbon impact of the project but evaluates the implementation and effectiveness of both social and environmental sustainability policies and processes. It highlights the major successes and important learnings for future events and assesses how well the sustainability targets were met.
The purpose of this report is to provide a useful resource for other large-scale outdoor arts and cultural events and productions that are looking carefully at social and environmental sustainability.
The greatest carbon savings were from Lumenators (participants) or staff and crew using coaches instead of individual car journeys (47.23 tCO2e), vegetarian meals instead of meat (approx 25-30 tCO2e) and choosing hotels with green energy tariffs (16.3 tCO2e).
- 50/50 split of vegetarian and meat meals overall
- 71% of suppliers came from within 50 miles
- 13/19 events used over 80% renewable energy
- 81% of Lumenators shared transport
- 26% of accommodation had a green energy tariff
- Followed the waste hierarchy and diverted >99% of our waste from landfill
- Accurately measured impact across all areas for all stakeholders for scope 1, 2 and
- Taken action to ensure the long-term impact of the activity is climate positive through mitigating ten times the carbon footprint through the planting of 15,154 trees with the Woodland Trust*
“We did not take a ‘business as usual’ approach to this work and our aim was for Green Space Dark Skies Lumenators to become caretakers of nature for the future. Our landscapes are places worth protecting, for everyone, forever. Our aim was for Green Space Dark Skies to be an example of best practice in sustainable event production, thinking about all aspects of our operational delivery. From the outset, we wanted to be transparent about successes and challenges for the collective benefit of everyone working in event production.”
Nathan Jackson, Head of Production, Green Space Dark Skies, Walk the Plank
Read Green Space Dark Skies Sustainability Impact Report (PDF)
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Please attribute as: "Walk the Plank: Green Space Dark Skies Sustainability Impact Report – Executive Summary (2023) by Walk the Plank, licensed under CC BY 4.0