Environmental Policy and Action Plan 2022/23

Northern Ballet is a registered charity, renowned as the busiest and widest touring of Ballet companies in the UK. We recognise the unique privilege the cultural sector holds in responding to the climate emergency and the responsibility we have for leading the urgent change required towards a more sustainable future. We are acting in the immediate term to change practices across our entire business to lead positive change. We are addressing this challenge by focusing on the following 5 areas:

• Operations - reducing the environmental impacts of our operations and buildings across all sites
• Production - establishing an environmentally sustainable production and touring model, embedding the actions from the Theatre’s ‘Green Book’ in our practice. Exploring ways that environmental themes can be addressed on stage or screen in our artistic work
• Travel - enabling sustainable travel to be used by our staff, audiences and other stakeholders. Accelerating the adoption of carbon neutral travel within our business
• Community - Ensuring that our staff are equipped with the knowledge to take decisions in full knowledge environmental impact they will have. Embedding sustainability in our education work
• Partnerships - developing environmental collaboration with our key partners – city/region, corporate or individual supporters, colleagues in the arts, our main touring venues.

We have defined our ambition of the next 3 years (2023-26) as follows:

We will have a clear understanding of our environmental impact with metrics and feedback mechanisms in place that allow the executive to plot a route towards net zero. We will be open about how we plan to do this and make commitments publicly to lead others on this journey.

For the year 2022-23 our priority is:

We will focus on improving the quality of data we hold on the impacts of our business. Alongside extending the data we capture to include the impacts of our touring we will implement environmental reporting on our new mixed programme by collating a materials inventory as per the Theatres Green Book.

Header image by Jonathan Taylor.