Forest Hills Stadium Goes Carbon Neutral

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — After focusing on sustainability initiatives for years, Forest Hills Stadium is ready to go fully green.

The music venue, which has one of the most packed summer lineups citywide, is going carbon neutral this season, planning to entirely offset its fossil-fuel emissions, it announced.

"From our concession areas to backstage and beyond, we're committed to making shows at Forest Hills Stadium as environmentally friendly as possible and offsetting any impact we do have," the stadium wrote online.

While the stadium's plan is carbon neutrality, it has a goal of being "climate positive," meaning it would actually remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than what it emits.

Pledging to go net-zero, though — an increasingly common promise from companies and governments in the face of the climate crisis — can have different meanings.

In the case of Forest Hills Stadium, it seems the music venue is going to work on onsite "conservation efforts" while supporting a grassland conservation project in Colorado, according to its announcement.

In partnership with several sustainability-focused organizations, the stadium is also planning to educate concert-goers about how they can reduce their own carbon footprint, it announced.

Tree-planting initiatives are a common way that companies achieve so-called net-zero carbon emissions, but these programs can also be "contentious" and "absurd," The New York Times reported, since trees can burn in increasingly-common, climate-induced wildfires and making this kind of net-zero promise doesn't necessarily mean reducing carbon emissions.

A representative for the stadium didn't respond to Patch's request for comment by the time of this article's publication when asked about what its specific onsite conservation efforts will entail.

The stadium's carbon neutrality announcement comes amid a busy summer lineup, as artists flock to the outdoor venue, some for their first performances since the pandemic.