Learnings from the Architecture Fringe’s First Environmental Reporting Cycle
Learnings from the Architecture Fringe's First Environmental Reporting Cycle
By the Scott McAulay
Over the last year, the Architecture Fringe has boldly set out into new and familiar territories: complementing our biennial and internationally-renowned festival with the first iteration of our newly developed International Summer School - Earth Station; deepening and extending our learning from 2025’s festival with a second part to Recipro-Cities, Communal Infrastructures; and increasing our international presence and reach with team members co-programming events at Harvard. Behind the scenes, we recently marked a quieter but no less significant milestone: completing our first Environmental Reporting cycle - something that’s been both a generative and reflective learning experience for the team.
This reporting is a requirement for Creative Scotland’s Multi-Year Funded organisations. Its purpose is to capture the environmental impacts and chart the ecological ambitions of reporting organisations alongside their associated emissions and future plans, enabling Culture for Climate Scotland (CCS) to map Scotland’s changing cultural landscape and its climate activity year-on-year and guide their support.
Reporting follows a standard structure for organisations and venues - encompassing topics ranging from but not limited to Circular Economy Planning, Travel and Adaptation Planning (including recording instances of Climate Impacts on activities) to Influence and Programming and Emission Reductions. Throughout the year, CCS hosts complementary learning sets to lay a foundational baseline of knowledge across those taking part of culture’s significant capacity for and role in supporting transformative climate actions and activities, to give organisations regular chances to talk to their peers doing the same environmental or sustainability work, and to share examples and stories of what other organisations have done to date.
We purposefully spent time alongside delving into our emissions and developing future actions to celebrate and reflect upon our climate activity past and present - a lot of what we have done and platformed to date has responded to and encouraged ever-wider responses to the Climate Emergency and other aspects have championed and explored anticolonial relationships to land and waterways, and to learn from best practice in the sector. We envisioned the exercise as a time to keep on raising the bar of the Architecture Fringe’s environmental ambitions and to identify where we might have the greatest impact going into the future as an organisation and as part of a wider ecosystem of practice.
In parallel to undertaking this reporting, over the last year the Architecture Fringe has:
Become signatories of the Green Arts Charter and are charting our progress against its commitments.
Pitched into the ongoing activities of The Visual Arts, Craft and Design Sustainability Working Group - a cohort of organisations and venues that emerged from Springboard in 2022.
Attended a gathering for MYF organisations in Glasgow at the Board Walk.
Begun the development of a new long-term thread into the Architecture Fringe’s future, Spatial Solidarities; an initiative first publicly introduced at a Creative Glasgow event that will reimagine what is typically inwardly-facing environmental and climate work as outwardly-facing spatial justice-rooted programming - gathering our community around us on a regular basis in one of Scotland’s first mobile Apartheid Free Zones.
Whilst carrying out this reporting and developing our own plans, we’ve been collecting examples of best practices and mapping instances of this across the Architecture Fringe’s history. An immediate action we plan to take, to multiply the impacts of undertaking this Environmental Reporting outwards, is by including new sections from 2027 in our How To Take Part Guide for Open Programme participants covering CIrcular Economies and Adaptation Planning - sharing ways to design events and source materials in circular ways through existing networks and to share contingencies for events programming in an age of rapid and uncertain climate change.
Given our size as an organisation - that doesn’t operate from one home building - and the resources we have, we recognise that the greatest impact on catalysing transformative climate activities and actions that the Architecture Fringe can have is through our collaborations across and beyond Scotland's architectural and cultural landscape, the community of practice and knowledge exchange we can cultivate and gather around us, and through our programming - with each iteration of the Architecture Fringe festival and beyond.
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