In this guest blog, Greenwich+Docklands International Festival’s Executive Producer, Ellie Harris, shares the festival’s journey to reducing carbon emission year on year. In 2024, they focused their sustainability strategy on energy efficiency and green power management with a resulting 64.75% reduction in emissions equivalent to 172.04 tonnes of carbon and they successfully eliminated diesel generators from the multi-venue 16-day event. Here she shares the challenges encountered and how using a step-by-step approach and consistency in data collection supported their success.
Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (GDIF) celebrates its 30th year of bringing world-class, outdoor international performances to public spaces in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, Newham, and South East London. The festival is free to attend and reaches audiences of 50,000+ across its 16-day programme each year. GDIF is a leader in sustainability and has a Platinum award for accessibility for Deaf, disabled & neurodiverse artists & audiences from Attitude is Everything. The organisation was instrumental in the set-up of Eco’Operation: a new platform to build a network of international & UK festivals to plan for more sustainable touring.
GDIF is also part of the Global Streets Consortium which promotes environmentally conscious touring models, touring work to multiple partners across England with connected performance dates.
The Challenge
Outdoor arts in public space often falls between the gaps for streamlined data collection: we’re not on one site for the 16 days with one waste contractor, a stage, mains power. Instead, we’re building new spaces on multiple sites, sometimes just for one day. Each year we focus on a specific environmental footprint to address, with the aim of making focused and meaningful progressions rather than trying to tackle everything all at once. This also means that financial commitments can be made more considerately. For example, in 2023 we conducted a case study to measure both qualitative and quantitative outputs of our work on international artist travel, favouring trains over flights. I’ve often felt it very overwhelming that if we’re not fixing it all, we’re not doing enough. I have to constantly remind myself that we have made great strides for a small organisation, and that addressing the climate crisis is an ongoing journey that is never finished.
Improving energy efficiency and moving to green power
For GDIF 2024, the footprint we addressed was our energy usage and green power management. Historically, data had been sporadic as the knowledge wasn’t there across freelance individuals to report this data, and there was no cohesive approach to power usage. To overcome these gaps and inconsistencies we worked closely with our Head of Technical (HoT), Ben Bodsworth, to change the way power was managed across the festival and set ourselves an ambitious aim – 2024 would be the year we would move entirely away from diesel generators at GDIF!
Many of our sites don’t have mains power available, so instead of diesel generators we used battery power, or HVO generators (Stage 5 where available). As we have become more strategic with our power planning and gained the oversight and joined up thinking needed from our Senior Production Team to share resources and delivery logistics across the festival as a whole rather than on a show-by-show basis, we have been able to make further efficiencies and moves towards green power.
We now build in each shows’ power needs to our logistics schedule and use batteries from one supplier across multiple events. This means that we can take batteries from one event to the next where possible, usually with other show elements in the van, saving on transport CO2e. In previous years, the projected CO2e of transporting battery-powered generators to us for a small PA for a 35-min show, outweighed that of running a small 6kva generator that was coming with an existing order/supplier.
Eliminating Diesel Generators from GDIF in 2024
In 2024, our HoT was responsible for all power-specific data collection, as well as overseeing all power install / derigs which meant that we could have continuity and monitoring across all sites. We invested in a number of power meters to measure mains electricity usage, where mains power was available. Whilst environmental data collection is a contractual clause for every Production Manager at GDIF to ensure a shared responsibility, having a nominated person leading on this meant continuity and more accurate data collection. As a result, we successfully measured all power usage onsite and no diesel fuel generators were used for our performances at GDIF 2024.
In GDIF 2023, we measured 266 tCO2e across all outputs and footprints, in GDIF 2024 saw us drastically reduce our total CO2e output to just 94 tCO2– that’s a 64.75% reduction equivalent to 172.04 tonnes of carbon.
These small and focused commitments have proven an effectual, strategic way for us to reduce our carbon emissions for GDIF. Case studies have helped us to give a qualitative narrative alongside the data: we’re not naïve to the fact that, as technologies and data collection tools improve and become more detailed, we may see our CO2e data outputs rise again, but the qualitative narrative will be incredibly important to give perspective, and to evaluate our practices to help us improve year-on-year. You can read more about the work we have been doing to tackle the climate crisis here: https://festival.org/environmental-sustainability/ – scroll down for the ‘Green Power Management’ and ‘International Artist Travel’ case studies.