Jamal Chalabi, Tour & Production Manager at Backlash Productions and Sustainability Facilitator at UK’s Tour Production Group and Head of Touring for A Greener Festival joins ecolibrium as trustee, July 2022. He brings 30 years of touring and production experience to the charity’s mission to support the live event and music industry tackling the environmental impacts of industry travel.
Through his role at Backlash Productions, Jamal has worked with high profile artists spanning multiple genres: from DJ Shadow to Pendulum and more recently with Bring Me The Horizon, Massive Attack and James Bay, while supporting tour teams to consider sustainability and take positive action to reduce emissions. Jamal’s roles as Sustainability Facilitator for the UK’s Tour Production Group (TPG) and Head of Touring for Greener Festival (AGF) allow him to share the best practice, guidance and tools for working with artists to create sustainable tours that he has gathered over the years.
An industry advocate for sustainable practice, he also actions his green talk into green walk. This includes embarking on a project with Massive Attack to reduce tour emissions while building a model for low carbon future tours; James Bay travelling the 2000 miles of his UK tour by EV, proving zero emission tour travel is a reality; and supporting Bring Me The Horizon to reduce their arena tour emissions by 38% in 2021.
Jamal comments:
“After working on many tours and productions over the years and now designing strategies to reduce their environmental impact, it’s clear that emissions from travel are a huge factor that must be addressed if the industry is going to make the positive contribution to climate action that the future necessitates.
If we can’t maintain a liveable climate on our planet there is no music industry; our systems must change; it’s not if but when, and the Live Events and Music Industry have an opportunity to lead the way, engaging fans and networks along the way. ecolibrium has made great progress in supporting the industry in tackling its greatest impact and I’m pleased to bring my experience to furthering this mission.”
Jamal joins the eleven current ecolibrium trustees from across the industry, including Ben Robinson (Director, From the Fields), Chris Rutherford (Co Founder, Boomtown), Liz Warwick (Environmental Consultant), Ed Gillespie (Greenpeace UK Board Member). Find out more about ecolibrium’s trustees: https://ecolibrium.earth/about-2/#trustees