An Update on Music Mark’s Sustainability Journey

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

On Earth Day 2024, we launched This Is Not A Rehearsal, our campaign to raise awareness and encourage action around the climate crisis in the music education sector. Alongside this campaign, we’ve been working on Music Mark’s approach to sustainability by working with Positive Planet to assess and reduce our carbon emissions. Here’s an update on how we’re doing. 

Positive Planet have initially measured our carbon footprint for the 2023 – 2024 Financial Year. For this year, we could only provide spend data, which Positive Planet described as low quality. We’re aiming to provide higher-quality data for the current financial year (2024 – 25) to ensure they can be as accurate as possible, but it’s great to have a baseline figure for comparison and to help us put a carbon reduction plan in place. 

The results for 2023 – 24 showed our carbon emissions to be 55.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Positive Planet’s Head of Training described this as the lowest total emissions of any organisation she had worked with! 

As a remote-working organisation, we have no Scope 1 (direct) or Scope 2 (indirect) emissions, so all our emissions come from Scope 3 – Upstream and Downstream emissions. This includes purchased goods, business travel, and home working.  

As well as measuring our carbon footprint, other actions we’ve taken this year include: 

• Carbon Literacy Training for the full team in April 2024.
• Carbon Awareness Training for the Senior Leadership Team with Positive Planet in March 2025.
• Incorporating sustainability into decision-making for our Annual Conference. This included choosing a venue with strong environmental credentials, having fully vegetarian catering, and focusing on Sustainability in the conference programme. 
• Encouraging the team to travel sustainably where possible. 
• Sarah Whitfield, Research Manager, created a travel tracking document for the team to record their travel details, which will help provide more accurate information for the next analysis from Positive Planet. 

The main focus of This Is Not A Rehearsal has been to support our members in taking their own action. We have run several events and training programmes to provide support with sustainability, including: 

• A bespoke Carbon Literacy Training course for music educators, which we ran twice and plan to run again in the future. You can express your interest here to be the first to know when bookings are available. 
• A training session on Environmental Finances. 
• Regular ‘Climate Conversations’, where we invited colleagues from across the music education sector to come together and discuss different topics relating to the climate crisis, sharing advice and best practice. 
• Programming sessions at the Annual Conference to focus on the climate crisis, including a panel discussion and breakout sessions on Greening Your Finance and the Greater Manchester Hub’s sustainability journey. We also invited Positive Planet to join us on a ‘Sustainability Stand’ to provide advice to delegates. 

As well as events, we’ve put together dozens of blogs and signposted resources to share knowledge and provide you with the tools to respond to the climate crisis, bringing them together into a monthly newsletter to keep you in the loop. Visit the This Is Not A Rehearsal website to access all of the articles and resources in one place. 

As part of the campaign, we commissioned the UCL Institute of Education to research the current environmental practices of music hubs, services and their delivery partners, and we’ll be sharing the findings of the report later this year. 

What’s next? 

We’ll be developing a carbon reduction plan as part of our ongoing work with Positive Planet, and working to improve our data quality to ensure we’re receiving the most accurate figure for our emissions. We’ll continue to consider sustainability in our decision-making, including our event planning and travel considerations.  

We’d also be keen to hear your thoughts – what support would you like from us to help you with your sustainability journey? If you have any ideas or requests, please complete this short two-question survey to share your feedback. 

Don’t forget to visit the This Is Not A Rehearsal webpage to explore more news, training & events, resources and research to support you on your sustainability journey. If you’d like to stay up to date with training and resources related to the climate crisis within the music education sector, click here to sign up for our ‘This Is Not A Rehearsal’ newsletter.