Adelaide Festival to be carbon neutral

Adelaide Festival directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield.

The Adelaide Festival is turning green for its 60th anniversary, with organisers declaring that next year’s event will be carbon neutral for the first time.

Festival directors Neil ­Armfield and Rachel Healy have announced their fourth ­Adelaide program, including contemporary dance, theatre and opera performances, and a free birthday concert in Elder Park featuring Tim Minchin.

The festival has estimated its 2020 carbon footprint to be 9000 tonnes, and has offset those emissions with the purchase­ of 9000 verified carbon units from a wind farm in India, for $18,000.

The credits will offset carbon emissions produced by air travel, accommodation, waste, venue power and other factors.

Healy says the festival has a responsibility to show corporate and cultural leadership on climate­ change.

Other major festival directors who met at the Melbourne Fest­ival this month have expressed interest in following Adelaide’s lead, she says.

The carbon credits will be expensed­ against the festival budget. This year’s festival, the most successful to date, took more than $6m at the box office and attracted 320,000 people. The state government contributes $9.1m.

Some international artists and writers are electing not to travel long distances to cultural events because of flygskam, or “flight shame”, a taboo on air travel because of carbon emissions. Adelaide Writers Week, which also announced its program­ on Tuesday, says at least three writers have declined invitations because of climate change.

Healy says the Adelaide ­Festival’s carbon offsets are not intended to overcome artists’ resistanc­e to air travel.

“We did not go down this path as a way of sending off flygskam,” she says. “It was not a way of shoring up our programming.

“However, it would be part of the conversation with artists and those who are interested in how we are grappling with the climate change emergency.”

Highlights of the 2020 festiv­al starting in late February ­include Juliet Stevenson in provocative­ drama The Doctor from London’s Almeida Theatre, Lloyd Newson’s contemporary dance work Enter Achilles from Ballet Rambert and DV8 Physical Theatre, and Romeo Castellucci’s staged version of Mozart’s Requiem from the Aix-en-­Provence festival.

Adelaide Botanic Garden will come alive after dark with flame and fire sculptures in a “dreamspace” devised by France’s ­Compagnie Carabosse.