“I used to take my own bathroom scales to events to measure the food waste.”

Fiona Pelham is the CEO of Positive Impact Events, a not for profit focused on creating a sustainable events industry. She is also the chair of international standard for event sustainability ISO 20121 and a member of UN expert advisory committees on the subject.

The global story of sustainability and climate change isn’t good. I spend a lot of my time in the sustainability world and the UN world and I’m very clear we need to change.

When Covid hit and the whole sector was grounded and not causing a carbon footprint, looking back that’s amazing. The last event I went to before the pandemic was an association event, and the keynote was all about the need to change our ways. The CEO of the association said to me afterwards, “People don’t want to hear this”. So I left that event thinking maybe the sector is never going to change, and thinking what do I do? And then Covid hit.

There’s a new narrative for the events sector, we are the ones that allow participation and inclusion to happen in decision making. We’re forever needed, as a vital sector. We’ve got an explosion of sustainability initiatives and now is the time for our sector to professionalise. We need to build back better and build a new narrative around what we do and why we do it.

It's clear that businesses are now understanding that survival is sustainability. We’ve just launched the Road to COP26 that we have tailored to SMEs, we’ve taken UN materials and tailored them to the event sector. I think that’s more useful.

Trying to have one checklist for the entire sector to follow: one, it won’t work; and two, it disempowers people. We all need to be thinking differently, so that means giving you the tools to make the right choices, so you can be thinking, “I’m choosing this water”, rather than just buying bottled water because someone says it’s carbon offset.

The speed of action has always frustrated me. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and in some ways it’s embarrassing, the rate of change is really low. I get frustrated by the lack of strategic focus for the sector.

For example, it’s great to have an ISO standard. In the construction sector they have many ISOs, you have associations providing education on the ISO, second parties certifying the ISO. But in events, there’s not so much of that. It’s like the sector said, “Oh that’s hard, we’ll do our own thing.”

In the events sector we go for the shiny and new. And that’s why we’ve got so many trade associations, so many award events, so many events for the sector, that’s our personality types. When you look at what we have to do as humanity for the future it needs a more grown up approach.

I live in Copenhagen now, but I am a Mancunian. Mancunians are the friendliest people in the UK I think. I would never trade being a northerner for being a southerner. It’s funny, I can see so much of my personality in Manchester’s history, because it was the place where women stood up for the right to vote first, and the place of the Peterloo massacre, where people stood up for rights, and then when I look at my career, I think it’s reflected. I got strength from Manchester to do all of that.

When I started I thought there would already be event companies focused on sustainability. That was my naivety. I set up Positive Impact Events in 2005 because I was having conversations with venues and they were saying, “Yes we can recycle, yes we can measure food waste”, and it wasn’t happening.

I was taking my own bathroom scales to stand on and measure the food waste. That was when I realised Positive Impact was needed to inspire, educate, engage and collaborate. We now have a community of over 1,500 eventprofs around the world that have said they want to take action on sustainability.