We are delighted to be looking back and sharing the wonderful successes of this year’s Edinburgh Climate Festival: Root & Rise!
This June we were joined by an estimate of 6,000 visitors to celebrate the 9th edition of the festival and it’s continued mission to inspire climate action within our local communities. We welcomed a variety of performances, live music, talks, speeches, workshops, activities, art installations and hosted over 56 organisations working across different areas of the climate sector. This year’s theme, Root and Rise, highlighted the importance of grounding ourselves in nature and well-being to build resilience and inspire collective climate action. Through this re-connection with ourselves and the earth, we then incentivate each other to rise stronger, embrace sustainable habits, and drive systemic change.
As every year passes, we hope to continue to grow – learning from past events and acting based on feedback and community input. We wish to share with you this commitment, our recent milestones and our hopes for future development. We have worked on upscalling the event by adding more content, a new talks tent, supporting local artists through added diverse art installations as well as increasing the accessibility of the event. Though we acknowledge we still have a long way to go towards becoming more accessible, this year’s efforts included an additional support form available to attendees ahead of the event, free sensory packs and visual maps/ programmes with estimated noise level details.
As a step to become more sustainable as an event itself, we launched a new energy initiative – powering the stage through pedal power and encouraging visitors to cycle at our designated bike station to keep the sound system alive. To add further incentive we held a competition, rewarding the top three longest cycle times with various prizes.
This year the festival also successfully trialed a few new schemes in hopes to achieve better waste reduction & improve its practices overall. A few to highlight, is the additional single use packaging fee that was implemented by all food vendors as well as the free raffle that aimed to encourage attendees to bring their own containers, rewarding their commitment by offering a chance to win one of three prizes (which were valued at 60, 50 and 40 pounds). Additional steps included hosting fully vegetarian and a majority of vegan food vendors, sustainably riso printed promotional posters in collaboration with local printers, providing food waste bins that can generate this waste into energy, fertiliser and compost and sourcing our stage and design from Re-Set Scenery who reuse parts of sets, saving them from landfill.
We are hoping that in the following years we can continue to build on these, reducing the event’s waste footprint, moving towards running fully on clean energy and further encouraging sustainable travel as well as increasing accessibility and range in the programme we deliver.
This year, we are proud to have been supported by an amazing team of 50 dedicated volunteers, who played an essential role in the delivery of the event and in the legacy of the festival. To celebrate their amazing efforts and to extend our gratitude for their work we recently hosted our annual Volunteer Appreciation Event. We were delighted to be joined by a group of our volunteers for a Riso & Gocco printing workshop with Edinburgh’s Out of the Blueprint, followed by a warm drink and social exchange in the sun. This was a lovely opportunity to connect further with each other, learn more about sustainable printing and even creating some zines, stickers and upcycled t-shirts that everyone was able to take home afterwards. We would like to extend our gratitude to those who joined us and to the whole team of volunteers that made the festival possible this year.
One final huge thank you to everyone who got involved, came along or supported the festival, including our funders, the National Lottery Community Fund, and this year’s sponsors, Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Edinburgh. We are already excited to see what next year brings, and hope you all continue to join us as we come together to build a more sustainable and connected future!
You can view the full report here, and visit the newly launched website for more information here.
