18,600 trees

The world is heating up.

That’s a fact, and that’s why Iceland Music realises the impact of the music industry and its contribution to climate change. Iceland Music’s carbon emissions in 2018 from air travel totalled 70 tonnes of CO2e. We feel it is important that we give at least as much to the earth as we take from it, so we wanted to make sure that we would at least neutralise our own direct carbon emissions from travelling for work and meetings.

On May 11 and June 1, 2019, Iceland Music and a team of volunteers travelled to eroded and uncultivated land at the foot of Mt Hekla. Supported by Guðmundur Tyrfingsson and IKEA, over 80 volunteers planted a total of 18,600 birch trees with the Hekla Forest Project, which will eventually cover an area of over 90 thousand hectares or 1% of the total land area of Iceland.

Over the course of the next 30 years, these trees will mature and grow to store hundreds of tonnes of carbon in the leaves, trunks and soil. Once fully mature, the forest will store nearly 20 times Iceland Music’s carbon emissions for 2018, making our 2018 year solidly carbon negative.

Being a North Atlantic island with no land connections and limited sea connections to the rest of the world, Icelandic musicians frequently fly internationally in order to play abroad. The Music Export Fund has supported numerous Icelandic musicians in international touring, and we encourage musicians to be conscious of the external costs to the environment that these tours generate.

We have now added a page on carbon emissions in music, and what members of the music industry can do to minimise our impact without sacrificing the music we love.