ABOUT CARBON NEUTRAL EVENTS
What does a Carbon Neutral Event mean?
- Calculating your event’s emissions
- Reducing your event’s emissions where possible
- Offsetting the remaining emissions through the purchase of carbon credits
Calculating your events emissions
- Essential step if you are to brand as carbon neutral
- Emissions accounting procedure should include all emissions you can control that occur through your event’s existence
What do you control as an event organiser?
- An event organiser has control wherever they can alter the emissions outcomes of an event through technology, policy or direct authority
- Policy extends to purchasing policy, transport policy and waste disposal policy.
What is CRI’s approach to calculating an event’s emissions?
- We use homogenous and clear emissions boundaries
- Life Cycle Emissions Factors used for electricity and fuel consumption, as well as from the decomposition of waste in landfill (from DECC)
- We use flight calculators that calculate distance traveled, are scaled for short and long haul flights and take into account ‘Radiative Forcing’ as well as incorporate most of the world’s airports. Factors for calculations are sourced from IPCC and the World Resource Institute
- Input Output factors that provide calculations of greenhouse gas emissions from the purchase of goods and services within the economy (CSIRO)
- A pre-audit is used to gauge cost of carbon and to scope emission reduction opportunities
- Event management budget is used to provide calculation of the anticipated impact
- A post-audit is used to calculate and verify the emissions that occurred
- We use worst case assumptions for energy efficiency and fuel efficiency; business as usual assumptions for catering, waste, transport and use of third party services
- This gives your total emissions and indicates the cost of carbon offsetting
Reduce your event’s emissions
- An important part of the process towards a carbon neutral event is to reduce your emissions. You can begin this at any stage in the planning of your event, though the earlier the better.
- See our event reduction tips here
Offset your emissions
- Carbon offsetting is a mechanism that allows organisations and individuals to neutralise their unavoidable climate change impact by purchasing carbon credits.
- Each carbon credit represents the abatement or sequestration of one tonne of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
- When you buy carbon credits, you help fund projects that reduce greenhouse has generation or sequester carbon. Examples of such projects are energy efficiency programs (eg. the installation of energy efficient light bulbs), renewable energy projects (eg. solar installations and wind farms) or methane abatement (eg. through waste diversion).
- While all the carbon credits represent the sequestration of one tonne of CO2e, different projects (even with the same accreditation) can have different outcomes for the environment. Therefore it is crucial that you carefully evaluate your options before you offset your emissions.
See our information about CRI’s carbon offsetting here.
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