Why is the events industry slow to adopt sustainability?

Planners need to change the way they think about events.

The average person generates between 2-4 pounds of waste per day, which translates to greenhouse gas emissions that directly cause our shared climate crisis by heating up the planet. The volume of emissions we generate in a day at home can so much as double when we are at an event, especially if we travel to get there. A three-day, thousand person conference (about the size of the coveted annual TED event in Vancouver) can generate more than 530 metric tons of CO2 which, according to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator this equals the total energy use of nearly 67 homes in one year. It would take roughly 632 acres of a (20 year growth) forest to sequester this much carbon. That’s a lot.

Now, think about how many conferences you are invited to each year, and how many you attend.

Events have a significant impact on climate change, it's easy to understand why. But they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, in a post-pandemic world events are back in full force and many industry people can barely keep up with the demand. It’s great to see a few organizers starting to experiment with ways to reduce emissions, such as the DGTL Festival and The Phoenix Open. But in reality, change is not happening fast enough and both organizers and attendees need to take a fresh look at the way they approach events.

Why isn’t the change happening fast enough? Because it requires time and it’s not easy to know where to start. It can feel overwhelming! Personally, I think the kicker is that lots of organizations see dollar signs when they think about making this kind of change.

The good news is that it’s actually quite straightforward to reduce the environmental impact of events, it doesn’t have to cost more money, and we’re able to track how much of a difference a well designed event can make so that organizations can share this data with their communities (and hopefully inspire others to do the same).

I’ll be posting more about this. If you’re interested in talking about sustainable events please message me!