Music festivals must adapt to climate impacts

RMIT’s Associate Professor Catherine Strong, an expert in Australia’s music industry, can speak about the latest insights from her research on how the climate emergency is impacting events, and what is needed to adapt.

“Climate impacts on music festivals are many and varied and can result from vulnerabilities in supply chains and disruptions from well outside the music industry itself,” she said.

In conjunction with Green Music Australia and the Australian Festival Association, Strong and her colleagues ran a roundtable with festival organisers, representatives of industry bodies and government.

One adaptation strategy suggested at the roundtable was the creation of more purpose-built sites for use by multiple festivals.

“If carefully located and designed, this could provide safe sites with more robust services and resources including clean water, sufficient shade, reliable power and communication infrastructure,” she said.

“Festivals could potentially reuse resources, such as crockery and signage, reducing supply chain dependencies and waste.”

These and more findings were discussed in The Conversation today.

“Making sure our festivals are able to keep happening is in its own way a form of preparing for a climate-changed future, because as a way of bringing people together and building social relationships, live music can improve the social cohesion we need to adapt to and cope with the climate emergency,” she said.

Interviews: Associate Professor Catherine Strong: catherine.strong@rmit.edu.au

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