Travel planning: What is your route and where will you stay?

Linear route planned? Plan the stops on your tour in such a way that the distances are as short as possible. Avoid detours and zigzags and actively approach organisers to fill in spots on the map. Multiple events in one place? Plan longer stays at one venue and use different formats. Besides the concert, you can offer a workshop or invite a local band to a jam session. Climate-friendly venues booked? Deliberately include climate-friendly clubs, concert halls and festivals in your tour calendar. Climate-friendly accommodations reserved? Flats and holiday homes are often more sustainable than hotels.

Tour group: Who’s going on the tour?

Team size reduced? If you don’t travel, you don’t cause emissions. That’s why you should only go on tour with the core ensemble if possible. Arranged to collaborate with local musicians? You can usually find professional musicians to support you on site. This way you can make fascinating new contacts.

Reisegepäck: Was muss wirklich mit?

Equipment geteilt oder gemietet? Beschallungsanlagen, Mischpulte und Lichtsysteme lassen sich in vielen Fällen vor Ort leihen oder mit anderen Musikern*innen teilen. Dadurch können Sie mit leichtem Gepäck reisen und die Bahn und den ÖPNV nutzen.

Recommendations for climate- and resource-friendly travel in the Music Division funding formats

The first step to a green tour

Music thrives on encounters – the direct experience of sound, contact with the audience and interaction with other musicians. Touring and other forms of travel are therefore an integral part of the lives of musicians of all genres. But when music is an event, it has a negative effect on greenhouse emissions and resource consumption – especially due to travel by visitors and musicians, the event itself and a multitude of other factors.

We at the Goethe-Institut would like to encourage you to plan and implement musical encounters in an environmentally friendly way and with the lowest possible carbon footprint. Some of the measures suggested here are easy for you as a musician to do yourself; others require you to work together with partners and organisers. For tours abroad, consulting with partners in the destination country about options for sustainable behaviour is, of course, a prerequisite.

The following checklist provides suggestions on how you can reduce your ecological footprint – the more of them that you implement, the better. When are you going on your green tour?

Where do emissions originate?

The climate protection organisation atmosfair calculated the CO₂ emissions of concerts, festivals and trade fairs. It showed that more than two thirds of emissions are caused by the arrival and departure of visitors and musicians. The remaining emissions are generated by accommodation, catering and energy consumption and waste disposal on site.

As a musician, you can directly improve your ecological footprint through linear travel planning and climate-friendly behaviour at your destination. Indirectly, you can influence the reduction of emissions by agreeing with the organisers on incentives for visitors to use public transport or green electricity, for example

Checklist, Part 1: Planning

You can already prevent a large share of emissions before you go on tour. With climate-friendly planning, you reduce travel routes for musicians and transport routes for material.

Checklist, Part 2: Implementation

Most climate-damaging emissions are caused by travelling to and from the event. You can act sustainably yourself and also motivate your visitors to switch to environmentally friendly means of transport.

Set an example

As a musician, you not only inspire your visitors with your musical skills and creativity, you as a person are also the centre of attention. Therefore, you should definitely use your role model effect. If you draw attention to your commitment to resource conservation and environmental protection in a way that fits in with your communication, you can motivate your audience to adopt environmentally friendly behaviour in the long term – and far beyond the scope of your concert tour.

Sustainability is more than environmental protection

Ecology is only one aspect of sustainability. When planning your events, you should also consider social sustainability and promote social diversity and participation on stage and in the audience.

With easy language on your website, with free tickets for accompanying persons and with low-threshold access to the event spaces, you reduce crucial barriers.

Guidelines “Nachhaltig unterwegs” (German)(PDF, 366 KB)