Creating sustainable congresses - the 12 tips you must know

Matt Grey, director of event:decision and Mark Handforth director of 3Sixty Event Consulting and Healthcare-Venues haven't got a quick fix for sustainable meetings and conferences. Instead, they lay out the most effective methods to cut emissions produced by events... 

Matt Grey

The easiest solution to the sustainability question is to stop flying to congresses. But that’s not a viable option. 

Calculations show that upwards of 80 per cent of the carbon footprint of a typical regional congress can be directly attributed to the flights associated with participant travel. An even greater proportion if the congress is international.

In theory, delegates could stop flying and organisers could make it so that they didn’t need to fly. However, there are several reasons the events industry won’t do this, particularly in the medical congress world. These reasons include the importance of scientific exchange - especially with the backdrop and fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, the commercial implications for content providers with in-person meeting formats being lucrative, and the preferences of speakers, participants, and sponsors for the benefits of in-person. 

Could flipping to fully virtual be the solution?  

As we all know, virtual and digital channels are available, and their efficacy in engagement and commercialisation is a topic of considerable discussion, across all event types, not just scientific and medical. 

While a study by Nature Sustainability, which measures diversity, equity and inclusiveness of virtual events, alongside their carbon intensity, found little discernible difference between the in-person and virtual conferences studied, it concluded that on average, more than 85 per cent of delegates prefer networking in-person.

The Global Business Travel Association makes a good case that business travel brings people together and fosters economic growth, amplified and quantified by James Latham in The Iceberg. Within this resource, the authors quantify the true value delivered by conferences, congresses, and international trade shows. This is reflected precisely in healthcare industries. 

Why should a healthcare professional not attend a therapy-specific congress to advance his or her knowledge and experience, bringing better healthcare outcomes to their own professional and patient network? It’s hard to argue against that one.

So, virtual can’t always be the answer. 

Mark Handford

Where should the carbon savings be made?

Congresses typically have a higher number of stakeholders than many organised events: the society, the destination, the venue, the hotels, the sponsors, industry, MedEd, communications agencies, stand-builders and events agencies. That’s a lot to coordinate and it’s a lot of activity to measure to understand the congress’s carbon footprint. Travel, accommodation, food and beverage, and event support services have not been held accountable for emissions we all release as a direct result of meetings with scientific and commercial objectives. 

While cutting air miles and going virtual aren’t the silver bullet solutions to mitigating the international congress industry’s climate impact, there are numerous ways organisers can reduce their community’s footprint. 

Here are our top 12 data-led recommendations to measure and mitigate:

1. Responsibility. Ensure that someone in a decision-making position within the society endorses sustainability. Ensure that sustainability is part of job-description deliverables and commercial partnership initiatives.
2. Commit to a strategy and deliver on this over time to measurable targets for ‘meetings sustainability’. Wrap this into broader organisational initiatives.
3. Measure. The tools are there for you to identify and quantify almost all emissions created as a direct result of your congress. You can do it yourself or there are event specialists who can help.
4. Consider limiting your in-person delegate numbers. This will place a cap on emissions and potentially widen your choice of destinations and venues. Make use of digital channels to enable equitable content distribution pre, peri, or post-congress.
5. Choose your destination with care. Venues and destinations best located within your audience region for accessibility by public transport/mass transit can result in far lower overall emissions profiles.
6. Co-create with industry and publish guidelines or mandate materials that can be used in exhibition stands at your congress.
7. Introduce exhibition booth carbon footprint measurement, with results published on-stand and via any event App. Almost forces your sponsors and exhibitors to deliver more sustainably. Their stand-builders should know how to do this.
8. Look at your timetable. Opening and closing a congress in the middle of the day allows many delegates to arrive and leave on the same day, rather than adding additional accommodation to the overall footprint.
9. Congress accommodation. The closer your hotel is to the congress centre, the greater the chance your delegates are happy to walk or use public transport/mass transit to attend. Carbon emissions from taxis to the venue are often hard to measure.
10. Food and beverage. Any provision of single-use plastic for beverages is an obvious no. Consider adding in a vegetarian-only meal(s) within the congress programme.
11. Offer offset projects to your stakeholders for quantified emissions, plus a channel for them to publicise their efforts in mitigation. Certified projects are not that hard to come by.
12. Don’t shy away from these discussions within your organisation. Be open, be honest and be transparent about your efforts. The United Nations and national governments are moving towards regulation. If you are a listed company, you should already be reporting on your carbon emissions – events and congresses are part of that.