Massive Attack’s science-led drive to lower music’s carbon footprint

In 2019, Carly McLachlan took a call from Mark Donne, a producer with the band Massive Attack. The BRIT award-winning, UK trip-hop band’s music — a fusion of hip-hop and electronica — and environmental activism have been pushing music-industry boundaries for 25 years. Donne wanted to know whether McLachlan, who directs the section of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research located at the University of Manchester, UK, would assess the carbon footprint of Massive Attack’s touring practices and, in doing so, create an action plan to kick-start change across the live-music sector.

After interviewing the band and its production team, holding workshops with industry professionals and crunching numbers on emissions, in June 2021, McLachlan and her team published the Super-Low Carbon Live Music road map for the UK live-music sector (see go.nature.com/3xdyq5j). The 17-page report is one of the first attempts not only to assess the carbon costs of the UK’s live-music industry, but also to suggest clearly defined and measurable targets that the sector could work towards to meet the aim of the Paris climate agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 °C. The road map’s key message is “that super-low carbon practices can only be delivered if they are central from the inception of a tour”.

Massive Attack used the road map to deliver what the band hopes was the lowest-carbon concert of its size so far, and one that “fires a starting pistol for the music industry to embrace the multiple opportunities for change”, the band said in a statement. On 25 August, some 34,000 people swarmed Clifton Down, a 162-hectare public park in Bristol, UK, the band’s home town, to attend the Act 1.5 Climate Action Accelerator all-day event.

Using the targets in the road map, the band and Act 1.5 team introduced changes to how the event handled power, waste, travel and food. McLachlan and her research team plan to use data from Act 1.5 to assess what could become new standards for a decarbonized live-music industry. Her team will use interviews with event organizers, conducted before and after the event, to see what worked and what didn’t. The researchers plan to publish their findings, along with a quantitative analysis of the event, in a report at the end of this year. But even without the report, if the audience left the concert happy, that itself could be key to persuading the industry that these academic recommendations are not only major, but also realistic.

“If you suggest something, and people say, ‘Well that would never happen,’ but then they can see it already has happened, it just unlocks a totally different way of thinking,” McLachlan says.

The entire concert was powered by renewable energy and batteries, with LED and low-energy lights prioritized for all stage and artistic lighting. Electric trucks were used to assemble and move batteries on site. The event used a pre-existing festival infrastructure and one of the largest batteries ever provided for a UK music event. This saved an estimated 2,000 litres of generator diesel, slashing 5,340 kilograms of carbon emissions.

To decrease the carbon cost of audience travel, which is thought to make up around 41% of an event’s total carbon footprint, train travellers who booked through the Train Hugger app were given special incentives. These included free transfers from the city’s two main stations to the event by electric bus, and people travelling from outside Bristol received access to a special Train Hugger guest bar, which included separate toilets. Food offerings were 100% plant based and provided by local suppliers, and the event had a zero-waste-to-landfill policy.

The band partnered with the local train network, Great Western Railway, to offer five extra trains after hours for fans travelling home. Now, the band is working with local organizers to develop a renewable-energy infrastructure at Clifton Down — a power substation and distribution system — to power future events. “Massive Attack are really good at legacy,” says McLachlan. “These big artists are shifting things along each time; anything that they leave makes it easier for the next lot to ask for the next thing.”

The right fit

From her office at the Tyndall Centre, McLachlan leads a team of about 50 natural scientists, engineers, social scientists and economists who research climate policy, with projects ranging from renewable-energy efforts led by the community to UK tidal energy and the circular economy.

The commitment Massive Attack has made to help produce the road map and then test its effectiveness is exactly what McLachlan looks for in a collaboration. She appreciates the band’s desire to challenge the status quo: they are “people who don’t want you to write them a report that sits on a shelf, but they really want to have a go at making change”, she says.

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Donne, who is now lead producer of Act 1.5, says that McLachlan was recommended to the band by one of her former colleagues, Alice Bell, who is head of policy in climate and health at Wellcome, a charitable funding organization in London. Massive Attack “wanted to set a clear standard to adhere to that was Paris 1.5 compatible”, says Donne. “Almost all the other schemes in the sector did not” meet that standard, he says. To do this, the team “needed scientists and analysts to make sure the work we built our own projects on was substantive, authoritative and credible”. Donne says that McLachlan “is a joy to work with: always clear, always analytical, always frank”. He especially appreciates the value that comes from the social-science element of the project. “McLachlan and [road map co-author Chris] Jones are very good at looking at knock-on effects and the possible negatives” of initiatives that the band considers, he says.

“The band knew we’d give it to them straight and not sugar-coat it,” McLachlan says, adding that good stakeholder engagement relies on building and maintaining honest relationships that are constructive and collaborative. “We’re a critical friend, but in a jolly packet,” she says of her team’s approach.

The project’s scope also appealed to her. “It’s an area that you might think is quite hard to decarbonize — artists flying around the world taking loads of stuff with them — how are you going to get carbon out of that? If you can demonstrate how to do it in a difficult sector like this, then couple that with the reach of Massive Attack — it can be powerful.”

Jones, a knowledge exchange fellow at the Tyndall Centre who has worked with McLachlan for more than a decade, says; “She’s generated a reputation for not pulling any punches with the kind of challenges we face on climate change.” He notes that there are many different perspectives and priorities in live events, beyond creating music and turning a profit. “So, there can be tensions and different camps can emerge. Carly is very good at building a collective response by bringing it back to the common ground.”

Listening to lower emissions

McLachlan joined the Tyndall Centre in 2003 as a research assistant and in 2005 she started a PhD there that examined controversies for developing renewable-energy projects. She was drawn to the centre’s interdisciplinary environment and working directly with businesses and industries, and, after a brief stint in industry, she rejoined the centre as a knowledge-exchange fellow. McLachlan enjoyed the challenge and pace of the work. “You’re running from one short-term contract to another,” she says. “I found that really exciting.”

Her current work focuses on decarbonizing cities. In 2019, McLachlan worked with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), the body that oversees the wider city region, to help Manchester become the first UK city region to set science-led emission-reduction targets in keeping with the Paris agreement, at a rate faster than the national target.

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McLachlan says that since 2019, more than 250 councils have used the carbon-budget tool created through the GMCA project to set or inform their own targets. “It’s not a silver bullet, but I do feel proud that we made the tool freely available,” says McLachlan. “It’s helped people think a bit more about near-term emissions reductions rather than the 2050 framing of reductions,” she says, referring to the UK government’s legal commitment to reduce its net greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050. Mark Atherton, director of environment at the GMCA, says McLachlan’s “skill at translating complex research into actionable insights make her an invaluable partner”.

McLachlan thinks that acknowledging what you don’t know is essential to an effective collaboration. “You have to be willing to say that you don’t understand. When you do this, you start to learn to speak in a way that more people can understand you and where you’re coming from.”

A planet safe from harm

Working with Massive Attack is “super inspiring”, McLachlan says, because of the band’s sheer persistence. When the group learnt that local trains would stop before the event finished, “They say ‘well then, let’s get some trains running. And who do we have to speak to make that happen?’ If you could bottle that, across all levels of climate action, that’s what we need.”

Donne says more work needs to be done to scale up the changes made at Act 1.5 to make them practical for other artists and events. For example, because diesel generators are cheaper and ubiquitous in the industry, there was an extra cost to not using them — shared in this case by the band and the battery providers. “Central governments need to step up and do more to incentivize decarbonization,” says Donne.

Some critics say that performers should stop touring altogether. But McLachlan hopes this work with Massive Attack will inspire the industry to make significant changes that can protect both the power of live music and the planet. There’s evidence it already has.

The Act 1.5 team is in talks with British rock band The Smile, formed by some members of the band Radiohead, to apply parts of the road map to its upcoming tour activities. And a spokesperson for REVERB, an environmental non-profit organization in Portland, Maine that helps artists such as Billie Eilish and Dave Matthews Band to reduce their tours’ environmental impact, says that the Tyndall Centre’s work on low-carbon music has “influenced and inspired” its work.

“I look at it from the angle of, what is the world that we are trying to protect?” McLachlan says. “I think live music is a really beautiful element of being human.”