The Theatre Green Book is an initiative by theatre-makers – guided by sustainability experts Buro Happold – to move theatre towards sustainability.

Early in the initiative, we divided that challenge into three parts: making productions sustainably, making our theatre buildings sustainable, and reviewing theatres’ other operations, from catering three volumes of the Theatre Green Book.

This volume, Sustainable Buildings, shows how to make our theatres more sustainable, even though many of them are ageing and starved of investment. It’s designed for executive directors and facilities managers, for boards, funders, local authorities and designers – for anyone who faces the challenge of taking a theatre building and making it ft for purpose in the context of the climate emergency.

Those theatres include some of our most valued, most loved and most prominent public buildings. If we want theatre to point society towards a sustainable future, then we urgently need to regenerate our theatres to suit a world of life-threatening temperature rise, over-exploited resources, and declining biodiversity. That journey will never be easy – theatre owners know how hard it is to raise funds for investment. But it is essential.

Sustainable Buildings gives theatre clear standards for assessing the challenge, selecting priorities – and setting out on the journey.