The (Carbon-Emitting) Elephant In The (Sustainability) Room: Fan Transportation

Music and entertainment have often been on the right side of history and ahead of the curve when it comes to social and political causes. From breaking color barriers to smashing gender stereotypes, music can lead the groundswell simmering just below the surface of popular culture.

It may be no surprise, then, that major artists are standing up for the planet, and those in power are doing so, putting real investment toward making concert tours and festivals greener operations. Global juggernauts like Coldplay, tastemakers like Billie Eilish and staunch environmentalists like Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson and AJR’s Adam Met have used their prominent public platforms to make sustainable touring top of mind for fans and shape the industry to the point that green riders are often commonplace and venues are now in many ways leading the charge demonstrating sustainable operations and putting big dollars knowing that the future is now when it comes to a sustainable future.

While this Earth Day issue is full of examples of artists, venues and others in the live ecosystem taking matters into their own hands to make events as green as possible, the discussion may be switching to what some are calling the elephant in the room on concert sustainability: fan travel to and from events.

“For the most part, the fan travel footprint, even at an urban venue, is going to be higher than any other carbon footprint within that event,” says Tanner Watt, director of partnerships at nonprofit environmental organization REVERB. “Certain times it’s about 50/50, but there’s a lot that goes into it.”

With events varying wildly by size and the preferred way of reaching an event being dependent on parking spaces, ease of access and still other factors, sustainability leaders are still working to determine just how big of a footprint fan traffic is responsible for, and what to do about it.

“Our promoters union in France has done a study with PwC on the carbon impact of shows in France, and 75%, or more like 77% to 78%, of the carbon footprint of a show is the audience traveling to those shows,” says Arnaud Meersseman, who runs AEG Presents’ France office.

Identifying the problem is one part of the equation, but figuring out what to do about it can be tricky. In the case of setting up greener tour dates, robbing from Paul (by making a more sustainable event by taking place over multiple nights in one venue) can be the case of paying Peter (by forcing fans to travel to a destination event).

“I’m dismayed that the shows are becoming increasingly bigger, and that they’re being staged at increasingly bigger venues, but I’m also dismayed by the fact that artists are now increasingly shifting the burden and cost of traveling to the audience,” adds Meersseman. “A lot of acts are building on the residency-model idea, where they just stay 10 nights at Accor Arena or The O2 (for example), and instead make the audience travel because the cost of touring big productions is getting out of hand. That’s going to raise the carbon footprint of these shows even more.”

While artists and the wider concert industry can’t exactly control how fans travel to venues or festivals, they can encourage more sustainable methods of doing so. Many venues are doing just that.

“Sustainability is huge for us, especially being in the Bay Area,” says Brandon Schneider, president and chief operating officer at the Golden State Warriors, who own and operate Chase Center arena in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood. “It’s something our fans expect. We don’t even have trash bins inside Chase Center, so everything is either recyclable or compostable. Then, every ticket to every event at Chase Center also serves as a Muni ticket. So all you have to do is show your event ticket and you ride Muni for free the entire day of the event. In terms of sustainability, I don’t know if there’s a bigger investment you could make than that one.” A representative from the Warriors said they do not have data showing how many people use the Muni to attend events at the arena, but are committed to being a transit-first venue.

Other venues implementing similar programs include Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle and the new Co-op Live arena opening in Manchester, UK, where show tickets include travel via the city’s Metrolink tram network and dedicated event shuttle buses. This is thanks to a partnership with Transport for Greater Manchester. There are also covered bicycle parking spaces.

The cliché “location, location, location” may apply to fan travel, as not all cities have robust public transportation systems, fans may not have the means to adopt electric vehicles and distance may not make ridesharing, bicycling or other greener travel methods feasible.

Still, as the industry continues to grow, notably on a global scale, the impact on the planet is being studied closely.

MIT Professor John Fernández is director of the Environmental Studies Initiative at MIT. He cites Taylor Swift’s six stadium shows in Singapore, her only Asian “Eras” tour dates, as an example of the difficulty in determining the fan’s carbon footprint.

“In Singapore, you’re going to track people from six or seven countries flying and maybe a major part of the audience,” Fernández said. “The fan can make a choice about how they get to the venue, and obviously a bunch of artists have tried to incentivize if you carpool or take a train. That’s really the main thing that fans can do. If they’re driving, and they’re carpooling, they can carpool in an electric vehicle. Of course, different individuals have different options. We’re looking into this. You can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from transport based on what fans decide to do but only a certain percentage. I suspect it’ll be somewhere around 20 or 30%.”

The ESI’s Assessment Report of Live Music and Climate Change is expected to be complete this summer.

REVERB is conducting its own research to better understand how to quantify the fan-travel carbon footprint, and how it should respond to the results.

“That’s a great example of how things are changing in the industry, not only in music, but also in the environmental world,” added Lara Seaver, director of partnerships at REVERB. She said the company’s approach has morphed over its 20 years in existence, and is still evolving.

“We’ve been working for the last few years and are about to finalize the results of a fan travel survey, knowing that the fan travel is a huge piece of carbon impact but everyone was kind of guessing,” she said. “We did a survey of 36,000 fans across all types of shows around the States, from club shows up through stadium shows, and what those commuting patterns to those events looked like. We’re working with UMass to put that data together to be able to share and look at and be really more thoughtful and considerate about both the reduction and how we consider the footprint that’s inevitable after the show happens.”

Ariel King, Andy Gensler and Gideon Gottfried contributed to this report