Jamal Chalabi, tour and production manager at Backlash Productions, head of touring for A Greener Festival, and sustainability facilitator at UK’s Tour Production Group (TPG) has joined ecolibrium as a trustee. 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, Chalabi 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. Chalabi is also sustainability facilitator for the UK’s Tour Production Group (TPG) a role, which allows 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 2,000 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 per cent in 2021.

Chalabi said: “After working on many tours and productions over the years and designing strategies to reduce their environmental impacts, 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 have to change; it’s not if but when, and the live events and music industry has 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 growing this mission.”

Chalabi joins the 11 current ecolibrium trustees from across the industry, including Ben Robinson, director of From the Fields, Chris Rutherford, co-founder of Boomtown), Liz Warwick, environmental consultant, and Ed Gillespie, Greenpeace UK board member.