By Gabriel Moran
Focused around sustainability, Future Yard has never just been a grassroots music venue – it’s a blue print of what the music industry could look like in a climate-conscious world.
On 20 November 2025, Future Yard hosted POP3, its third annual climate conference. A full day gathering, exploring the powerful role of the creative sector in driving environmental justice. The event brings together artists, venue operators, activists and academics from across the globe to bring meaning behind the climate cause.
Future Yard: Redefining What a Sustainable Music Venue Can Be
Based on Argyle Street, Future Yard is a community-focused, non-profit venue. Since fully opening in 2021, the 280-capacity space has become a hub for emerging artists, social change, and sustainable innovation. Most recently, the team has doubled down on its commitment to community-centred work and a love for the natural world. Sustainability remains central to its mission: Future Yard operates on a “triple bottom line” model, measuring success socially, environmentally, and financially. In partnership with Ecotricity Business, the venue has developed a Sustainability Roadmap that charts a route to operational net zero by 2030 and full net zero by 2035.
In a recent interview with Ecotricity, Future Yard’s sustainability manager, James Gillaspy, reflects on how the venue “reimagines the role of a live music space within its community” — not just as a venue, but as a locus for climate leadership.
Gillaspy explains since switching to Ecotricty’s 100% renewable electricity supply, Future Yard has cut a large proportion of its operational emissions – emphasising their biggest CO2 impact comes from audience travel. Future Yard is tackling this head on by promoting sustainable travel and partnering with Merseyrail to offer specific free return travel included in their Sustainability Travel Month.
Inside POP3: Future Yard’s Climate Conference for the Creative Sector
POP3 is Future Yards flagship climate event, brought to life in partnership with Ecotricity Business. This isn’t just a conference – it’s a day of debate, networking and original hands-on ideas for creative conversations.
POP3 is intentionally aligned with the UN’s Conference of the Parties (COP), where major moments of negotiations around emissions and climate finance are explored internationally. Future Yard positions itself as a grassroots counterpart to more traditional gatherings. The conference is free to attend, making it accessible to a diverse audience.
Not only did Future Yard use POP3 to launch their updated sustainability roadmap, showcasing its progress while setting new goals to achieve. They used the event to host an array of activities from talks to screenings to workshops.
Beginning with the Keynote address: Canadian musician and activist Luke Wallace opens the day, bringing his perspectives as an artist deeply engaged in environmental change. Using musical aspects his songs really spoke to the idea of collective belonging.
Next up on the agenda was the Sustainability Panel led by Ecotricity. This critical conversation involved discussions about energy, transport and food – three of the largest sources of carbon.
This was followed by The Future of the Merseyside Coast: In partnership with the National Oceanography Centre, this session reimagined the Merseyside coast in the face of climate change, imagining abstract ways to save our coastal habitats.
After lunch the next panel discussion was ‘Venues As A Centre For Change’. Hosted by EarthSonic, this discussion explores how grassroots spaces can become engines of social and environmental transformation. Specifically making us think about what shared values bring people together and the disconnect that lies between unshared values.
Following this was the Immersive Imagine Futures Workshop. Facilitator and cinema curator Bruno Castro presented the board game “Sustainability in the Arts” that made sustainability strategy creative, participatory and fun.
The day concluded with the film screening TAKKUUK. Inspired by their journey to Greenland with EarthSonic, UK electronic act BICEP has teamed up with seven indigenous arctic artists, from Greenlandic rappers to Inuit throat singers. This screening was a groundbreaking body of work, pulling together various cultures and media, it tore down the walls of social difference to emphasise our global climate crisis.
The Impact of POP3: Grassroots Leadership in the Climate Crisis
In Birkenhead and the wider Liverpool City Region, the conference emphasises how grassroots events can lead by example. Future Yard’s model is not only socially rooted but also deeply practical.
Leading the way to our sustainable future, Future Yard has launched the ‘Live Events Energy Scheme’, a collaboration with Ecotricity, as part of their mission to decarbonise their industry. The scheme allows access to the same high-quality renewable energy solutions as the industry giants, positioning Future Yard as the sustainable leader in the hopes to increase collective action to accelerate sustainability across the live events landscape.
Future Yard’s intent to publicly share their net zero roadmap, gathering experts and hosts inspiring conversations, sends a powerful signal: the climate crisis is not just an existential threat but a call to reimagine our way of life. For Birkenhead, that reimagining is happening now. In real time, with real people, making a real impact.