We are a community of musicians and music lovers committed to making classical music climate-friendly. While our impact on climate change and biodiversity is often overlooked, the reality is that our activities contribute significantly to carbon emissions. Classical music itself, on the other hand, has the equally overlooked potential to make a positive contribution to climate action.
We’ve decided it’s time to make a difference. That’s why we’ve come together to create EcoClassica – a movement dedicated to promoting sustainability in classical music.
Why?
🚨 The Urgency
Climate change and biodiversity loss are accelerating and everyone,
including us, the classical musicians and music lovers, must act now.
✈️ Our Impact
Our industry relies heavily on travel, especially air travel,
which is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Even as a relatively small cultural sector,
we have an important role to play.
💬 Rare Debate
Discussions and action on climate change are too
often seen as secondary in classical music.
It’s time to start a meaningful dialogue
and overcome the barriers to action.
🎶 Our Relevance
In Europe, classical music institutions work hard to remain relevant
in order to please audiences and attract funding.
Embracing sustainability can strengthen our role as cultural leaders.
⌚Better now than later
Classical music will have to rethink its activities down to the core.
If we wait any longer, we will have to adapt very quickly
to climate-related economic, environmental or political events,
or to resource scarcity caused by climate disruption. Better to start now.
💪 It is possible!
We believe that we can find solutions and inspire others.
We have the power, even as individuals, to make a difference –
be it through advocacy, daily decisions and example. 💚
What can we do?
There are generally 2 categories of possible action for us as classical musicians, music enthusiasts, and other members of a classical institution:
▼ Artistic actions
As musicians, composers, artistic directors and organizers, we can collaborate to create new live music experiences aiming to build a sense of community and inspiring people to engage with climate action. In short, we can use our artistry itself for climate action.
▼ Operational actions
It’s hard to understate the impact that the activities of classical music have. That’s why, at EcoClassica, we aim to promote low-carbon forms of transportation and measures incentivizing their use by the audience, as all the trips and tours made by musicians and audiences during a typical concert season have a devastating impact on global warming. We think it’s not only necessary, but also very much possible, to rethink how the tradition of concert touring and trips has developed into an unsustainable habit over the past decades.
The impact of classical music
In its purest form, classical music uses no energy and emits no greenhouse gases other than the food the musicians and audience members eat.
As soon as we start touring the world to share our music, however, that’s where it starts to use a lot of energy: in a case study of a Finnish orchestra, the emissions from touring in 2015 were estimated at 387 tonnes of CO2. That’s the equivalent of driving around the world 45 times, or the annual emissions of 50 average Europeans.
Not only that, in almost all studies about the climate impact of live arts, the travel of the audience is one of the biggest, if not the single biggest, impact*. In fact, audience members may have a smaller individual impact, but a few kilometres of car travel per person, can quickly add up when filling a concert hall over one year.
At EcoClassica, we believe that realizing the extent to which the climate impact of our trips (whether as audience members or orchestras) are in almost all the cases by far over the rest of our emissions, is crucial to defining the most effective measures to decarbonize one’s activities. Popular measures like reducing paper consumption, while laudable, are simply ineffective next to our important emission sources like travel.
Opera productions often have a significant environmental impact due to the energy consumption of lighting and sound systems, as well as audience travel.
*although the impact of building and transporting stage sets could be much higher, which is particularly relevant for opera productions