The onboard:earth community celebrated raising £740,000 for environmental restoration and community renewable energy projects at our annual gathering in Bristol, Feb 2025,
Together our brilliant community of event companies and their audiences raised over £100,000 for our environmental restoration partners in 2024 meaning we have now gathered over £740,000 for environmental restoration projects since the charity was founded by Boomtown Fair, Shambala and Kendal Calling in 2015!
Wow. All those individual donations add up to something amazing. At the event, onboard:earth’s CEO Chris Johnson announced our new target of raising £1 million by 2026, we launched new tools to support progress on measuring and reducing event-related travel impacts, and we celebrated the charity winning the LIVE Green Award in 2024.
Director of Boomtown and founding member of onboard:earth, Chris Rutherford, said:
“It’s amazing to see how individual donations from audiences and events across the live events industry can come together to create something so hugely beneficial for people and the planet. onboard:earth is a testament to the power of the live events industry to inspire people to take climate action and create positive impacts in the UK and across the world.”
This year donations have gone to four amazing projects through our two programmes: Trees+ which funds ecosystem regeneration and protection to preserve biodiversity and support the creation of sustainable livelihoods in areas already affected by climate change and Energy Revolution which supports community-benefit renewable energy generation programmes in the UK.
💚 Reforestation in Nicaragua, a PlanVivo verified carbon offset project, which works with smallholder farmers to restore forests in partnership with local communities. Find out more here >>
💚 Tree-planting, forestry protection and the creation of sustainable livelihoods through reforestation schemes in Northern Malawi. Find out more here >>
💚 Storing and sequestering vast quantities of carbon by protecting threatened rainforests. Safeguarding biodiversity by preserving vital wildlife corridors and funding training for local communities to combat threats such as forest fires and unlawful deforestation. Find out more here >>
💚 Here in the UK donations will fund a Community Energy Cooperative in Wiltshire for the construction of a rooftop solar array for a local school for students with special educational needs and disabilities, generating low-cost green electricity for the school, funding workshops on keeping warm in winter and using surplus power to fund local wildlife restoration projects. Find out more here >>
At the gathering members heard from Vicky Wallace, Fundraising Manager of Rainforest Trust, detailing the positive impacts that donations have already made for threatened rainforests across the world. This was followed by Danny Newby, Founding Director of Big Green Coach explaining how coach initiatives and ticketing strategies give festival organisers opportunities to get more visitors out of cars and using low-carbon transport to visit events.
Vicky said: “We cannot stop climate change without saving tropical forests. Rainforest Trust UK is proud to work with onboard:earth to permanently safeguard intact forests that sustain people and threatened species, and lock up billions of tonnes of carbon to alleviate climate disruption.”
To support events professionals, artists and crew to measure travel carbon on the move, onboard:earth has launched a free-to-download app, which allows users to log and download travel data, model low-carbon travel routes and fund environmental restoration per journey or on a subscription basis. A newly developed offline tool allows onboard:earth members to record and measure their scopes 1, 2 and 3 travel emissions to establish benchmarks, set reduction targets, and monitor progress.
Festival organisers, event companies, artists and crew can be part of the plan to raise £1 million for environmental restoration by contacting hello@onboard.earth or visiting