Australian festival season faces “urgent” threat from climate crisis, report finds

Australia’s festival season could become unviable due to the accelerating climate crisis, a report from Green Music Australia has found.

The report, titled Rain, Heat, Repeat: How Music Fans Are Experiencing Extreme Weather, features surveys from festivalgoers alongside data from The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and La Trobe University academics.

According to Green Music Australia’s poll, 85% of respondents said they had experienced “extreme weather” at a festival, with 68% claiming to have experienced it in the last 12 months.

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81% of festivalgoers agreed that Australian officials are “not doing enough” to protect them from weather conditions at music festivals, while 33% said they would avoid attending a festival due to extreme weather — 34% said they were more cautious about buying tickets to festivals altogether.

The report has been co-authored by RMIT sociologist Catherine Strong, who claims that the data points to a change in consumer habits in response to extreme weather, brought on by the climate crisis — with many festivalgoers choosing to stay at home rather than face soaring temperatures or storms.

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The report surmises that pressure from decreased ticket sales and soaring insurance, due to the increased likelihood of extreme weather conditions, is already having an impact on Australian festivals; this pressure will increase as the likelihood for soaring temperatures, flash floods and more grows throughout the country.

According to The Guardian, 26 live events were called off in a single week in Northern Australia last month ahead of Cyclone Alfred.

Last year, Pitch Music & Arts Festival was forced to cancel its last day after the Country Fire Authority (CFA) urged attendees to leave the site due to a bushfire warning in the state of Victoria. Temperatures during the festival had soared above 40 degrees Celsius.

While in 2022, Strawberry Fields Festival in New South Wales was cancelled due to flash flooding, with a river near the site having reportedly rose to levels “higher than ever seen before.”

Megan Townsend is Mixmag’s Deputy Editor, follow her on Twitter