Christopher BarrettThe industry’s biggest festivals have become too large to be environmentally sustainable and their capacities should be reduced, according to academics.
The published research found that a sustained shift towards larger and more complex events is resulting in a corresponding upward pressure on environmental impacts. The researchers said the past decade has seen festivals such as Glastonbury (cap. 210,000) and Download (95,000) increase in scale to become ‘mega’ events both in the UK and beyond.
The group said that quantitative evidence repeatedly demonstrates that travel is the single biggest impact and that it scales strongly with audience size and internationalisation. As a result, operational practices, no matter how polished, are unable to compensate for the increased travel emissions.
The academics are calling for carbon budgets as a condition of licensing, mandatory travel demand management, and for capacity reductions at the largest festivals where other measures fall short.
The findings are published in a new peer-reviewed paper by A Greener Future director Dr Teresa Moore, Centre for Events & Festivals founder Dr Mike Duignan and independent researcher Adrian Bossey.
The authors of the paper argue that festival ‘gigantism’ is the central sustainability problem facing the large-scale music festival sector: “The evidence is unambiguous: absolute environmental burdens continue to rise because scale outpaces efficiency. Polishing operations while expanding capacity is not a sustainability strategy; it is a contradiction. Bigger bins, greener generators, and carbon offsets cannot compensate for hundreds of thousands of people travelling to a greenfield site with inadequate public transport. The sector cannot offset or efficiency-measure its way out of a structural growth problem.”
“Whilst this will be contentious, we believe that the sector must choose: value over volume, or business as usual in the face of a climate emergency,” said Bossey.
Moore said, “Our paper is designed to provoke discussion. We argue that festival gigantism and its increased environmental impacts can only be addressed through explicit governance, including capacity reductions.”