Greenfest & One Degree Get Global Gong

On the eve of Australia’s Walk Against Warming and with Copenhagen’s Climate Change Summit underway, Brisbane’s Greenfest and News Limited’s One Degree Campaign have been recognised internationally by the United Nations Environment Programme in its special report “The Case for Climate Neutrality”.

Australia has received some very positive recognition from United Nations Environment Programme Director, Achim Steiner and stands to now showcase Australian renewable energy ingenuity on the world’s stage.

In the UNEP presentation of “The Case For Climate Neutrality”, Greenfest, a grassroots festival in Brisbane which attracted 60 000 people to environment causes earlier this year,  was recognised alongside Live Earth, as examples of positive cultural change helping to accelerate preferences towards a cooler planet.   

Greenfest Founder Colman Ridge said:

 “Greenfest is an action for cooler planet culture and next year we will launch the world’s first solar stage hosting the world’s biggest acts without plugging into the national coal powered grid.  This will allow us to showcase Australian renewable energy ingenuity to the world on the world’s coolest stage. 

Further to the recognition of cultural innovation down unde, Mr Steiner has invited Mr Ridge to become a founding participant in the new United Nations Music & Environment Initiative saying “the initiative aims to leverage the power of music to address some of the most pressing environmental problems facing the planet.   Festivals and other music events are in a unique position to influence the decisions and opinions of their audiences, inspire them to take a positive action for the environment.”  

On Saturday 12 December the Greenfest team worked with Queensland Conservation Council to organise the successful Walk Against Warming show.

Guest of honour at the Brisbane event was the Regional Director of UNEP for Asia and the Pacific, Dr Yong-Woo Park.

Source: www.greenfest.com.au

From the UNEP publication “The Case for Climate Neutrality”:

The ability to inspire audiences to make long-term changes is at the heart of the rapidly growing Greenfest event in Brisbane, Australia. Originally inspired by the Live Earth concerts of 2007, it is a three-day festival of music and a showcase for practical measures for greater sustainability— in the latest event in June 2009 it attracted 60,000 people.

According to Greenfest’s founder Colman Ridge, “The purpose of Greenfest is to promote a ‘Cooler Planet Culture’. Carbon neutrality is expected of us. Our ability to network our 200 plus exhibitors and a broader network to help each other and others reduce their footprint has become a year-round opportunity for us to assist acceleration of the lower carbon economy.”

Ridge’s advice to other events considering climate neutrality is to avoid building up the production levels to beyond what audiences really want, making up for it afterwards by buying more offsets. “Walk the talk by having the best staging and sound, but keep high energy consumption lighting and effects down to a minimum, and work with innovations to curb the rest; such as LED lighting. Your music festival is an opportunity to demonstrate the change in audience expectations and preferences: bring simple quality and content to life and you will have an outstanding success.”

On the offsets themselves, Greenfest chose an initiative run by the Queensland state government called Ecofund, which aims to regenerate habitats bordering national parks, expanding wilderness areas and creating biodiversity corridors. For Colman Ridge, this link with broader environmental objectives is what Greenfest’s audiences want to see from the offsets they are helping to support.

“Winning the race against climate change will be a hollow victory if we arrive without rich biodiversity and real wilderness on Earth. Let’s not lose sight of conservation priorities for biodiversity in pursuit of carbon neutrality—let’s leverage the race against climate change to fund conservation. This approach will be respected and preferred by your customers, and you can point to specific and meaningful outcomes from your care for a carbon neutral Earth,” says Ridge.

The communications and marketing sector has unique opportunities not just to reduce the footprint of their own businesses, but to use their communication skills to influence many others—clients, employees and the public—to reduce theirs. As the environmental campaigner Sir Jonathan Porritt once put it, the sector has a large climate brainprint.

In 2007, one of Australia’s biggest media groups, News Limited, followed its parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, in pledging to become climate neutral by 2010.

To help achieve that goal, News Limited launched a programme called One Degree, an initiative to reduce greenhouse gases across the business, and to raise awareness of climate change among the company’s staff and the broader community.

At the heart of the One Degree programme is a tough target for reducing its own emissions—by 20 per cent between 2007 and 2010. This involves preventing 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere—the equivalent of taking 7,500 cars permanently off the road.

News Limited has looked at its operations across Australia from top to bottom, and come up with more than 90 projects to reduce emissions. In some cases, looking at the inefficiencies of a single process can produce a “big hit”. For example, at its Mile End print centre in Adelaide, News Limited found it could prevent more than 2,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions by reducing leakage of compressed and humidified air.

According to News Limited’s sustainability manager Dr Tony Wilkins, the efficiency gains identified so far have resulted in an annual saving of about 1.5 million Australian dollars. “Climate neutrality should not be seen as a difficult goal, but as a milestone on the longer path to tackling climate change,” Wilkins argues. To complement the One Degree programme, News Limited launched a competition amongst its staff called “How eco would you go?”, offering a Toyota Prius hybrid car to the winner.

The competition aimed to encourage staff to think about ways in which their actions impact climate change, and to make small changes in their day-to-day behaviour both at home and in the workplace to reduce their own footprints.

To enter the competition, staff pledged to undertake 14 days of action to reduce carbon emissions and to inspire others in original and sustainable ways. They could pledge to take action at home, at work and/or in the community. But the actions had to have some positive impact on climate change and had to be something that could be sustained to make a long-term difference.

The competition drew more than 300 pledges from News Limited’s staff, ranging from riding a bicycle to work, to starting a community vegetable garden and sharing laundry loads with flatmates.

“We had people looking at all aspects of their lives—from home, with the family or flatmates, to at work and in the community,” says News Limited’s Chief Executive John Hartigan. “Each person’s circumstance was different, but almost without exception they found that cutting their carbon footprint also saved money, encouraged their personal fitness and, in many cases, gave them back precious time.”

The winner of the competition, printer Carl Winter from Perth, made changes in every aspect of his life. He planted vegetable gardens, installed rainwater tanks, turned off the heat, switched to energy efficient lighting, started composting and making bread, ditched the dishwasher and installed a wind turbine to provide power. The family cut back on their car use and shopped in bulk to save time, travel and packaging.

Source: www.unep.org