Green Space Dark Skies (GSDS) was an ambitious cross-sector collaborative project produced by Walk the Plank and commissioned by UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK in 2022. The project put environmental sustainability at its heart, achieving some major sustainability successes and impressive carbon savings. Walk the Plank is now releasing the report to share this best practice with organisations delivering outdoor events. GSDS won the National Outdoor Events Association Sustainability Award in 2022.
Green Space Dark Skies took thousands of people into National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty to create large-scale temporary artworks with new Geolight technology, which was captured on film.
To meet the challenge of the climate emergency, Green Space Dark Skies employed a collective and collaborative approach. The open sharing of knowledge and experience was vital to establishing a new working culture where sustainability was as central to the event production as health and safety.
Green Space Dark Skies as a large-scale national project provided the resources and partners to embed sustainability from the planning, delivery and measurement stages towards achieving ambitious targets across both the social and environmental aspects of the project. The scope of data collection was vast including energy, transport, materials, food and beverage, waste, accessibility, diversity, and digital. The aims were to leave no trace and be climate positive, ultimately removing more carbon from the atmosphere than it produces.
The report contains the carbon data for the entire project, shares learnings and innovations gathered on the way and does not shy away from some of the challenges faced.
The summary of the Sustainability Report is free and available to access on the Walk The Plank website.
