Navigating the future: Reflecting on sustainable audience travel in Edinburgh
With Edinburgh aiming to be a net-zero, climate-ready city by 2030, reducing carbon emissions from audience travel is urgent challenge for the arts and cultural sector. In March 2026, Culture for Climate Scotland – with support from the City of Edinburgh Council – brought together arts and cultural organisations, transport operators and city planners for a half-day workshop exploring how collaboration can help reshape the way audiences travel to events in Edinburgh.
In this article, Sana Azeem, Culture for Climate Scotland’s Green Arts and Data Officer, reflects on the discussions and future commitments made by organisations at the event.
Why does audience travel matter in Edinburgh?
Edinburgh is at a turning point in how movement, culture and sustainability intersect. The infrastructure for sustainable travel is, in many ways, already available. The question is how the sector mobilises around it to create a future where people travel to events as sustainably as possible.
To this end, over the past five years, Culture for Climate Scotland has been working with the City of Edinburgh Council to support arts and cultural organisations to better understand and reduce their carbon emissions. Through this work, it has become increasingly clear that audience travel is a major contributor to an organisation’s overall carbon footprint. However, audience travel emissions are tricky to tackle because, unlike emissions from buildings or operations, audience travel sits outside of an organisation’s direct control.
The graph below illustrates how audience travel compares with other sources of emissions reported by organisations in Edinburgh’s arts and cultural sector. This data is reported via annual environmental reporting. As you can see in the graph, audience travel accounts for the majority of emissions across all reporting years, rising from approximately 75% in 2022/23 to over 90% in 2023/24 and 2024/25. Audience travel has a larger environmental impact than all other sources combined.
Addressing the issue
The event began with a panel discussion followed by Q&A session. The panellists were:
- Rurigdh McMedde, Placemaking & Mobility Strategy & Development Manager, City of Edinburgh Council
- Fiona MacLeod, Director of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Walk Wheel Cycle Trust
- Keith Finlay, Head of Commercial, Lothian Buses
Rurigdh stated that 65% of residents already travel to work without using a car, and satisfaction with public transport in Edinburgh sits at 86% – the highest in Scotland. He noted that the city centre is largely experienced by those who walk, wheel and cycle, emphasising the importance of protecting and supporting these forms of movement. It therefore begs the question, if sustainable transport infrastructure already exists in Edinburgh, how can the sector encourage more people to use it when travelling to and from events?
The panel all agreed that behaviour change does not happen in isolation from travel infrastructure, and the sector must take an active role in shaping audience decisions before and during events. Fiona suggested a few approaches the sector could take. Firstly, she emphasised the importance of working with communications teams to build a genuine strategy, one that goes beyond adding a travel information page to a website, but instead reframes sustainable travel as reliable, safe, enjoyable and accessible. Secondly, she further emphasised that accessibility and inclusion must be built into sustainable planning from the outset, highlighting venues such as National Museum of Scotland and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as examples where welcoming entrance spaces and pedestrian-friendly surroundings make arriving by foot or bike a positive experience.
Keith echoed the importance of early-stage planning, stating that collaboration between event organisers and transport providers from the start can enable better coordination, communication and more effective service planning . This could lead to a positive reduction in carbon emissions from audience travel through planning timetables and temporary services around congestion hotspots.
Rurigdh took this one step further and suggested that organisations could embed travel decision-making into the event experience itself. This could look like using digital and physical touchpoints throughout an event space – in venue screens, announcements, printed guides – that drip-feed travel information across the event to further encourage behaviour change.
Scenario-based problem solving
Following the panel discussion, participants took part in an interactive group workshop to explore real-world audience travel challenges. The groups worked through two scenarios using a three-step process – understand the problem, explore options and, select and implement a balanced strategy.
Scenario 1: The 5,000 person surge
The situation: A major one-off event – eg a large outdoor concert or high-profile opening – has no parking available and the nearest train station is a 15-minute walk away.
The challenge: To help 5,000 people exit the event safely at 11pm, without a gridlock of taxis and private cars.
Potential solutions identified by attendees:
- Communicate travel options early and repeatedly, framing them around cost and experience, ie guidance such as ‘the walk takes 12 minutes and there is a bus at 11:20pm’ lands differently than ‘please consider sustainable travel’.
- Offer real-time journey planning through partnerships with apps and platforms that audiences already use.
- Design a walking route, not just the event. It should be well-lit, clearly signposted, stewarded at key decision points and have an atmosphere that makes the walk feel like a continuation of the evening.
Scenario 2: The festival peak
The situation: A major festival where 40% of the audience comes from overseas and 60% are locals already struggling with overcrowded trams and buses during the festival period. Audience travel accounts for 75% of total carbon emissions. The festival has committed to a 50% emissions reduction by 2030.
In this scenario, the international reach that defines Edinburgh’s major festivals is inseparable from a significant carbon cost. However, attendees suggested they could mitigate emissions by:
- Encouraging international visitors to extend their stays and attend multiple events – a visitor who flies in for five days generates significantly fewer emissions per cultural experience than one who flies for a single night.Partnerships between festivals to promote a broader cultural itinerary could shift the balance.
- Introduce a tourist travel pass for public transport, making the bus or tram the obvious default for visitors arriving in the city and removing the friction that sends people to taxis.
- Spread events across different parts of the city – a festival trail model – to reduce congestion hotspots and distribute impact more equitably across communities.
The attendees discussing workshop scenarios and solutions in the second half of the session
Making commitments
The session concluded with a collaborative commitment wall activity focused on identifying practical next steps for organisations and building future connections. Attendees identified actions under three themes: do, contact and stop.
Do
Participants committed to a range of practical actions, including:
- Improving travel information on event websites
- Communicating the benefits of sustainable travel
- Incorporating travel considerations earlier in event planning
- Developing partnerships with transport providers
Contact
Participants identified key organisations to collaborate with, including:
- City of Edinburgh Council teams working on mobility and placemaking
- Lothian Buses and other transport providers including Ember Buses
- Walk Wheel Cycle Trust
- Festivals Edinburgh and other cultural partners
- Tourism and heritage organisations exploring sustainable travel strategies
Stop
Participants reflected on assumptions that might be holding progress back, including:
- Stop making car parking appealing, even by implication
- Stop assuming audiences know how to get to venues sustainably
- Treating audience travel as a secondary issue rather than an initial core planning consideration
- Viewing audience travel challenges in isolation rather than collaboratively
What’s next?
This event made it clear that whilst the scale of audience travel emissions is large, there is also a genuine appetite from organisations in Edinburgh to tackle it. Audience travel is not a problem any single organisation can solve alone – it is a city-level challenge that requires sustained collaboration between organisations, transport operators, city planners and local communities.
Culture for Climate Scotland has committed to working with the City of Edinburgh Council to build on this momentum – connecting organisations with the right partners, sharing case studies of best practice as they emerge and continuing to create spaces for similar collective problem-solving events. A further workshop will take place in late 2026 focused on transforming the commitments made during this event into sustained action.
Further resources
Culture for Climate Scotland’s guide to audience travel
National Cycle Network routes in Edinburgh, the Lothians and Scottish Borders
Relevant report and article
Transforming Audience Travel Through Art
Slow travel to the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2025