'Eventprofs aren’t doing enough to reduce emissions from audience travel'
Ben Quarrell of Sustainability Simplified reveals his top tips on how to measure and reduce audience travel emissions
The event industry is making progress on sustainability. Compared to pre-Covid times, the difference is night and day.
It was talked about pre-2020 but not much was happening across the corporate events and experiential industry. Today you will be hard pressed to find an agency that doesn’t mention sustainability on their website, the Net Zero Carbon Events pledge has over 700 signatories and over 250 businesses are using the carbon calculator TRACE, by isla.
However, one area where there doesn't seem to be enough progress is audience travel. Estimates of its contribution to an event’s impact vary but I have never measured an event with international travel where audience travel emissions was less than 70 per cent - and it is usually closer to 90 per cent.
Despite this, it often gets labelled ‘hard to measure or control’ and ignored or deprioritised. I fully understand the argument from an event organiser that they can’t really control audience travel, but these emissions are occurring as a direct consequence of the event, wouldn’t occur otherwise, and therefore should be included.
Ben Quarrell, co-founder of Sustainability Simplified
Ben Quarrell, co-founder of Sustainability Simplified
As the famous quote goes, "you can’t manage what you don’t measure". Yet the Net Zero Carbon Events pledge doesn’t require organisers to include audience travel emissions in their company carbon footprint (but will review this in 2025) unless they want to declare an event as carbon neutral.
I can see why this has been done, but it does seem a bit like fossil fuel companies trying to only declare the emissions from drilling oil and not the approximately 90 per cent of emissions that comes from it being used.
This should be about reducing emissions from the atmosphere as quickly as possible as opposed to an accounting exercise.
How to measure audience travel emissions
If you are using a registration system, you only have to add two questions to registration, asking guests where they are travelling from and the travel method.
Even if you don’t do this, attendees’ postcodes are often part of registration data and you can make some general assumptions based on travel methods based on where people are coming from and then copy the data into a carbon calculator like TRACE or Ecolibrium to estimate the emissions.
If you aren’t using a registration platform, a simple audience survey will do the trick.
How to reduce audience travel emissions
- For repeat events you can analyse where your guests came from and use that to choose the location with the least overall air travel. Select locations that are major transport hubs to avoid the need for connecting flights, and opt for venues and hotels with multiple public transport connections to reduce the use of taxis.
- Run several smaller events instead of one larger one. In 2022, SAP held its flagship event Sapphire in 9 in-person locations with one virtual event instead of the usual format of two large events. This means guests can choose an event local to them and reduce travel emissions that way.
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