The European Space Agency (ESA)’s Business Applications and Space Solutions (BASS) programme is to collaborate with Love Tomorrow in a drive to help make sports and mass events more sustainable. Love Tomorrow is the sustainability platform of Tomorrowland, one of the largest music festivals in the world. It initiates sustainability projects that are helping to transform Tomorrowland events to be more sustainable and manages storytelling, diverse events, and a vibrant community to inspire.

The two organisations are working together to facilitate the development of innovative, space-enabled solutions for the sustainability challenge in three critical areas:

• Carbon reduction
• Sustainable mobility
• Supply chain transparency within the circular economy and food

As a first step in this collaboration, Love Tomorrow is supporting the new BASS funding opportunity, ‘Space for Sustainability in Sports and Mass Events’ which is open until October this year. Love Tomorrow is involved in this funding call as a prospective customer and has identified a number of critical domains for their operations that they intend to support. Data shows that transportation accounts for 73% of Tomorrowland’s carbon footprint, so the aim is to support innovative ideas that will use space-based technologies to develop smarter, greener mobility to reduce environmental impact and improve visitor travel experiences at large events.

“This is an important collaboration between two organisations with common goals” said Davide Coppola, Head of Space Applications Initiatives Section at ESA. “As festival season gets underway in Europe, we are working together with industry to use space technology to reduce congestion, minimise air pollution and develop safe and accessible solutions for end-to-end journeys.”

As well as looking at mobility solutions, ESA and Love Tomorrow are also addressing challenges around transparency in the whole events supply chain, from refreshments to stage materials. The goal is to support projects which leverage space data to ensure responsible sourcing, ethical food systems and more efficient use of resources.

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