Music Festivals Seek Greener Footprint

29 June 2024, United Kingdom, Somerset: The crowd watching Coldplay performing on the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm in Somerset. Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire/dpa
29 June 2024, United Kingdom, Somerset: The crowd watching Coldplay performing on the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm in Somerset. Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire/dpa
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Music Festivals Seek Greener Footprint

29 June 2024, United Kingdom, Somerset: The crowd watching Coldplay performing on the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm in Somerset. Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire/dpa
29 June 2024, United Kingdom, Somerset: The crowd watching Coldplay performing on the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm in Somerset. Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire/dpa

Three planes, 270 tons of equipment, 800 square meters of stage: the figures from Madonna's massive free concert in Rio in May sounded like they came from another age.

These days, megastars are usually keener to claim a smaller footprint.

Coldplay, who just headlined Glastonbury Festival in Britain, recently announced they had cut carbon emissions on their world tour by 59-percent compared with their last tour in 2016-17.

They have taken innovative steps including solar panels and even a special dance floor that generates electricity from the movement of the audience, Agence France Presse reported.

Critics point out they are still flying around on planes, and there was particularly opprobrium in 2022 when they announced a partnership with Finnish oil giant Neste.

Though Neste promised to help them use sustainable biofuels, the Transport and Environment campaign group said Coldplay were being used by the oil firm as "useful idiots for greenwashing".

Though the overall impact is hard to measure, one study by University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute in 2010 estimated that Britain's industry alone generated 540,000 tons of carbon emissions annually.

Climate group Clean Scene found that the top 1,000 DJs took 51,000 flights in 2019, equivalent to 35,000 tons of CO2 emissions.

Climate commitments

As a result, all the big festivals now have climate pledges and initiatives, from composting and car-pooling schemes at Coachella in California to renewable energy usage at Glastonbury.

One festival that has taken a lead is We Love Green in Paris, as the name suggests.

Some 110,000 festival-goers attended last month's event to see artists including Sza, who travelled with "almost no equipment" according to Marianne Hocquard, the festival's head of sustainable development.

She said that was down to the festival ensuring they have much of the equipment needed by its artists, and setting energy caps for performances.

Others have taken radical steps: the Bon Air festival in Marseille canceled DJ I Hate Models this year after learning that he was coming by private jet.

Many events now encourage their attendees to take greener modes of transport.

We Love Green launched a partnership with the French Cycling Federation to organize convoys of bikes for this year's edition, and said 14 percent of ticket-holders came on two wheels despite the dodgy weather, up from eight percent last year.

But there is a limit to how much can be done.

When Taylor Swift played Paris in May, the city mayor's office said there was a surge in arrivals of private jets at local airports.

Private jet operators have been jumping on entertainment events such as festivals or the Euro 2024 football tournament to boost their business.

There was little about the climate in a recent press release by private jet operator KlasJet, which said: "When you're traveling to an amazing event like Euro 2024, the last thing you want is for your experience to be ruined by a delayed flight."



‘More and Faster’: UN Calls to Shrink Buildings’ Carbon Footprint

 Snow capped mountains are seen behind the downtown Los Angeles skyline, California, US, March 7, 2025. (Reuters)
Snow capped mountains are seen behind the downtown Los Angeles skyline, California, US, March 7, 2025. (Reuters)
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‘More and Faster’: UN Calls to Shrink Buildings’ Carbon Footprint

 Snow capped mountains are seen behind the downtown Los Angeles skyline, California, US, March 7, 2025. (Reuters)
Snow capped mountains are seen behind the downtown Los Angeles skyline, California, US, March 7, 2025. (Reuters)

Countries must move rapidly to slash CO2 emissions from homes, offices, shops and other buildings -- a sector that accounts for a third of global greenhouse gas pollution, the United Nations said Monday.

Carbon dioxide emissions from the building sector rose around five percent in the last decade when they should have fallen 28 percent, according to a new report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

It said emissions had plateaued since 2023 as climate policies began to have an impact, particularly green building standards, the use of renewable energy and electrified heating and cooling.

But the building sector still consumes 32 percent of the world's energy and contributes 34 percent of CO2 emissions, the report found.

"The buildings where we work, shop and live account for a third of global emissions and a third of global waste," said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP.

"The good news is that government actions are working. But we must do more and do it faster."

She called on nations to include targets to "rapidly cut emissions from buildings and construction" in their climate plans.

The report said that while most of the countries that signed up to the 2015 Paris climate deal -- nearly 200 have signed -- mention the sector, so far only 19 countries have sufficiently detailed goals in their national carbon cutting plans.

The report said that as of 2023, important metrics like energy-related emissions and the adoption of renewable energy "remain well below required progress rates".

That means that countries, businesses and homeowners now need to dramatically pick up the pace to meet the 2030 emissions reduction targets.

- 'Critical challenge' -

Direct and indirect CO2 emissions will now need to fall more than 10 percent per year, more than double the originally envisaged pace.

The rollout of renewables is a similar story.

The share of renewables like solar and wind in final energy consumption rose by only 4.5 percentage points since 2015, well behind the goal of nearly 18 percentage points.

That now needs to accelerate by a factor of seven to meet this decade's goal of tripling renewable energy use worldwide, UNEP said.

The report urged countries to accelerate the roll-out of renewable technologies and increase the share of renewables in the final energy mix to 46 percent by 2030 -- a rise of around 18 percent.

It also called on policymakers to increase energy efficiency retrofits to include better design, insulation and the use of renewables and heat pumps.

More work also needs to be done to improve the sustainability of materials like steel and cement, whose manufacture accounts for nearly a fifth of all emissions from the building sector.

But the report did say that circular construction practices were increasing in some areas, with recycled materials accounting for 18 percent of construction inputs in Europe.

The authors urged all major greenhouse gas emitters to take action by introducing zero-carbon building energy codes by 2028, and called on other countries to create and tighten their regulations within the next 10 years.

The report highlighted positive national policies from China, France, Germany, Mexico and South Africa among others.

But it said financing remained a "critical challenge".

In 2023, it found that global investment in energy efficiency in buildings fell seven percent from a year earlier to $270 billion, driven by higher borrowing costs and the winding back of government support programs, notably in Europe.

Those investments now need to double -- to $522 billion -- by 2030, it said.