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Sustainability Impact Report

Green Space Dark Skies put environmental sustainability at its heart, achieving some major sustainability successes and impressive carbon savings. We are now releasing the report to share this best practice with organisations delivering outdoor events.

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 produces.

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.

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).

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, Walk the Plank