Introduction
Aberdeen Performing Arts is a charitable trust founded in 2004. Their vision is to create a vibrant, cultural hub at the heart of city life – inspiring, exploring and engaging through live performance and creative projects.
Aberdeen Performing Arts (APA) manages three iconic Aberdeen city-centre venues, His Majesty’s Theatre, The Music Hall and the Lemon Tree. In addition to the spaces within those venues, they run over five festivals a year, and a production company, with over 1,000,000 visits to our venues annually. Their small and ambitious team are working towards achieving Green Tourism Awards for all their venues, and they are a proud member of the Green Arts Initiative run by Creative Carbon Scotland. In November 2019, they were one of the first arts organisations to win the VIBES Award for Environmental Management and have been recently shortlisted under the Climate Action category within the North of Scotland Thistle Awards.
Beginnings
The Beyond Green team became involved with APA back in 2016 through a Zero Waste Scotland project with one of our long-term clients – Castle Group Scotland. Castle Group Scotland was a key contractor on the refurbishment of the Music Hall, and Beyond Green worked collaboratively with them to explore reuse opportunities for the hall’s plaque flooring, lifts and timber supports.
After this engagement, we remained in touch, and in early 2019 we began supporting APA with their regulatory compliance with the Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS). In December 2019, with a successful submission sent in, life for APA, like for all of us, was soon about to change significantly with the onset of the pandemic. Like many organisations, it was all hands on deck to navigate these uncharted waters.
Now
It is a testament to the resilience and creativity of the APA team to have come through the pandemic with all its challenges to the creative and events sector. Our founder Paul was delighted in October 2022 to receive an email from the Head of Finance and Sustainability, Matt Godfrey, wishing to continue our partnership with their important strategic objective to develop a Net Zero roadmap.
It was clear from Paul and Matt’s conversation that both organisations had built on their strong shared values around Optimism, Curiosity and Teamwork, all crucial to working towards Net Zero. They also had a personal shared connection, as two accountants working in sustainability; Paul commented to Matt during their first conversation how uplifted he felt seeing the title of Matt’s role and that he was leading APA’s Net Zero project.
Through an interactive session using collaborative tools like Miro, the ambitious team included 11 carbon emission categories in their baseline, including many challenging ones such as Audience travel, purchases of goods and services, employee commuting and homeworking! Once we all knew what was going to be in our Carbon Pie, it was time to gather data and crunch some numbers. We found the emissions relating to production of programmes by third-party promoters particularly difficult, given data availability, and investigated how to apportion the emissions from a tour going to many UK venues. We decided to exclude them this time, and revisit them in the future when there is more data available.
So in December 2022, we started out on our 5 steps to Net Zero Roadmap project, with an initial briefing about Net Zero over Microsoft Teams which serves to ensure that everyone is on the same page given the raft of confusing terminology and greenwashing out there. APA wanted to ensure they expanded their current carbon reporting to be in line with best practices, so we also covered what is included in a carbon footprint for Net Zero to create a shared knowledge base for the project team.
Sustainability is at the core of everything we do within Aberdeen Performing Arts, and to ensure that any plans were understood and embedded within our organisation we wanted to undertake a baseline assessment and planning process that was truly collaborative.”
Matt Godfrey, Head of Finance and Sustainability
With the Net Zero carbon baseline (31 March 2020) and analysis completed, it was on to the challenge of identifying ambitious actions to reduce the baseline by 42% by 2030, an interim target in line with Science Based Targets (SBTs). But the plan also needed to be pragmatic, practical and financially viable for a small organisation with huge demands on its resources. APA wished to gather as much input from across the organisation as possible, as Net Zero is not a stand-alone project delivered by a few, but requires everyone to be involved to be successful. To support this, we adapted our Carbon Reduction Ideas session in Miro to enable asynchronous contributions from the APA team, along with a short video introducing the session. In effect, we created a hybrid method to deliver the workshop, allowing in-person and offline contributions to low-carbon ideas.
With over 50 carbon reduction ideas covering energy, travel, and procurement, we had the interesting task of identifying and prioritising the top 15 to model into a 10-year road map. Using the Miro voting function, a priority matrix and a timeline, we could easily visualise the decision process so everyone could understand how we arrived at the final list of ideas.
The final stage was to quantify the expected reduction in carbon emissions from the priority ideas until 2030. Again, we needed to be pragmatic and use project resources (budget and people’s time) wisely, so with a balance of good data and assumptions we identified a significant reduction emissions from the priority carbon reduction actions for the current carbon boundary.
It is usual for the first Net Zero roadmap to identify a shortfall against the SBT for 2030. For APA this is more challenging, as options to reduce energy use are limited due to old stone buildings. Although APA is investigating opportunities for saving more energy, they are not going to be relocating their 1800’s Music Hall to a new BREEAM office! Another challenge is that a high proportion (75%) of emissions, like for many SMEs, are out of their control, in particular audience travel which is highly dependent on individual choice and the availability of public transport.
Future
In the last 9 months, Aberdeen Performing Arts’s Green Team, led by Matt as Head of Finance and Sustainability, have engaged the wider team to generate ideas and prepared their initial Net Zero roadmap to guide them over the next 5 years or so; no small feat for a small team. Their dedication and ambition are impressive and they work pragmatically to overcome the challenges.
Aberdeen Performing Arts with the support of Beyond Green are now conducting the ESOS 2023 work to calculate more detailed cost and carbon savings from energy use, which will feed into the next iteration of the Net Zero roadmap in late 2023. In addition, we are working together to build a carbon reporting tool to help them understand progress against their Net Zero roadmap. This tool will help Matt provide different levels of detail to APA’s board, wider stakeholders and the Green team so all parties can make informed decisions.
We are delighted to be working with Paul and the team at Beyond Green on our next stage towards our Net Zero journey.”
Matt Godfrey, Head of Finance and Sustainability
Furthermore, Aberdeen Performing Arts will continue to work on improving data collection, often a challenging area for emissions that are outwith their direct control (Scope 3 emissions). They are already making headway by looking at streamlining data gathering for audience travel through their booking system and formalising the data captured from visiting companies in terms of freight.
And all the great progress made this year has already gained recognition, as Aberdeen Performing Arts is shortlisted in the Climate Action category at the Aberdeen City & Shire Thistle Awards 2023, the first year of this category within the awards.
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