SD-scene: Issue 15; June / July 2008

Founder and ambassador of the Blue project, and round the world sailor Conrad Humphreys

Young people are influenced by role models in sport, on TV, in music and by advertising so we need to work in those mediums. This is why DCMS is so well placed to drive this agenda. The Blue Project started with a group of sportspeople who compete all over the world in the most incredible natural environments – surfers, sailors, polar explorers, divers (all the sports have water elements) - who believe that sport can be an effective tool for getting people passionate about the environment. Blue ambassadors are spokespeople for their sport and the environment in schools and at events. For example, James Hooper and Rob Gauntlett – the youngest Britons to climb Mount Everest - have just completed their epic pole-to-pole trip. They were featured every week on ITV and they’ve used their story to inspire young people and to raise the issue of climate change through the things that they’ve witnessed in the poles. Having sailed three times around the world myself, I know that resources are absolutely critical to a competitive sailor. You have a limited amount of fuel and water to keep the boat functioning and there are certain simple things you do on a boat that become a way of life, such as you’d never leave a tap running, you never waste fuel unnecessarily, and you take kit that lasts. These are all good lessons to share.

Alison Al-Tikkal founder of Julie's Bicycle

The ethos behind Julie’s Bicycle is that the music industry needs to sort itself out internally before anything else. The industry and artists are massively over exposed and we needed to take things forward in the context of science instead of aspiration. The first thing we did was to commission a report from the Environmental Change Institute, called First Step. It scoped out the carbon footprint of the music industry, including the manufacture of CDs, the heating and lighting of music venues, the air travel of artists and staff and audience travel to live performances and festivals. It’s a complicated supply chain. One of the first things we discovered was that, while there was a huge desire in the industry to become engaged, there was a level of bewilderment and a lack of control over energy management. We also discovered that the live sector was probably responsible for about 70 per cent of the industry’s emissions, particularly if you include audience travel. In the recording industry, the big impact is CD packaging. We now have working groups on each of these issues. We also have the ‘bike club’, which is a network of creative industry people working on the green agenda. We also have a small team of environmental auditors working with companies, and we’re building some very industry-focused benchmarks. Festivals are leading the way on sustainability. Because they’re short occasions, which are all about celebration and living life in a different way, they can try new things out. Big music festivals - like Latitude in Suffolk -  are doing everything they can to reduce emissions, promote alternative travel, and in recycling and composting. They’re a great testing ground for audience tolerance and they’ve become a very innovative part of our cultural economy.

Matt Bell, Director of campaigns at CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

Buildings contribute around 50 per cent of Britain’s carbon emissions. Our job at CABE is to champion the design, management and maintenance of buildings and places. Our big focus is on sustainable cities - not so much on individual buildings, but how you make places sustainable - working with the eight major cities outside of London. As part of our programme, in June we launched the first ever climate change festival in Birmingham (the festival will be rolled out across other core cities in 2009). The festival turns the debate about sustainable development on its head: its all about here and now and making climate change collective, sociable and fun. There were 181 activities over nine days, ranging from the first ever Green Day, which is a project with schools that uses buildings and places to teach young people about climate change; to the world’s first tai chi for climate change and tea dancing in the city! This reclaimed Birmingham’s public spaces and got people thinking about their city in a different way. We also commissioned 15 nine-foot tall, pink picture frames and set them around the city centre - they all framed views of the city. We were asking people to stop, sit down (attached to each frame was a bench), and just think about their city and how it had to change to become a well designed, low carbon city. On the final day we wrapped it all up with the idea of ‘holidaying at home’. People don’t holiday at home partly because of the weather but it’s also down to the fact that they think the place they live in is quite unattractive. What we’re saying is, if the city was well designed to be low carbon, it would be much more beautiful, much greener, much healthier, in fact the kind of place you would probably want to spend time in.