Traveling Responsibly, Or, What the Hell Are We Doing?

It’s summer season now. Everything is in bloom and green in my garden. Vegetables are growing and the sun is shining.
But, all is not right with the world. We just had the hottest week of weather globally in 100,00+ years, while there are floods and torrential rain in parts of the world, not to mention wildfires out of control and smoke so bad it turns the sky orange and creates the worst air quality in the world on some days in major US cities.
Temperatures right now are 100+ across the South and Southwest United State.
And yet, travel has returned to pre-pandemic levels. There are events happening right now in places like Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Miami and people are flying there, adding to the already higher greenhouse gas emissions than we will soon be able to tolerate.
And, people are still flying, even for one day meetings! Is that one day meeting so important that it couldn’t be done virtually?

WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING?

For all the talk about sustainability and regeneration or any other term related to being more responsible towards the planet and people (and there is a lot of it right now) we’re still tinkering around the edges.
Sure, we’re doing away with plastic water bottles (mostly), but we’re still serving food that has a heavy carbon footprint and water footprint and transporting it thousands of miles sometimes to have that one ingredient that isn’t local or in season during your event.
Sure, we’re not printing as much on paper but there is more and more digital content and signage using unheard of amounts of electricity that is often generated using fossil fuels in massive data centers, some which are located in areas of extreme weather that requires even more electricity to run either air conditioning or heating to maintain the right temperatures on all those servers generating our digital world.
Maybe we’re working with companies that are trying to electrify their transportation. Maybe we’re eating more salads and less beef. Maybe we’re using venues that have some solar or wind power. All good, but these are still baby steps when we’re in a crisis.
And, of course, we’re still flying. A lot, apparently. Is this sustainable? Is it responsible?
I recently sat down with Shawna McKinley, one of the smartest people I know when it comes to sustainability issues in the event industry. You can see our interview on the Society For Sustainable Events YouTube channel here

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwP7kHuRwZs.

We talked about a number of issues related to travel and transportation for events. Here are a few of the key takeaways from our conversation:

• While only 2.5% of aviation contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, air travel and other forms of transportation continue to make up anywhere from 70-95% of an event’s carbon footprint. This has ongoing implications for the survival of the live event industry.
• Regulations or company mandates could create a threat to the ability of individuals to travel to events and poses a threat to human connection and economic growth that is driven by live events.
• We’ve always had the perspective of how sustainability fits into events. We need to shift that perspective to how events fit into sustainability. The good news is that companies and organizations are looking to events to make a difference.
• We should consider events as way to engage attendees on the issue. Hack-a-thons focused on sustainability issues, experiences and spaces within an event are some ways to start to engage attendees and other stakeholders and exhibit the value that we place on sustainability at live events.
• Policy has to help and event professionals should support and actively promote policy and initiatives around innovations like sustainable aviation fuel, net zero targets and pledges, roadmaps to sustainable events, electrification of cars, trucks and buses used for and at events and sustainable travel policies across the sector and within their own organizations.
• Event professionals should be modeling the behavior we want from all stakeholders when it comes to responsible and sustainable travel. This includes considerations around flying less, questioning whether an event could be delivered digitally or virtually, looking at more regional and local events to avoid air travel, doing site surveys less frequently or virtually using virtual reality tools or filmed fly-throughs of a property and taking into consideration how many events we need to attend.
• Event professionals and planners might consider providing options for travel and the impact it has to attendees during the marketing and registration process. One way to do this might be by thinking of options as a nutrition label you might see on food packaging.
• Event organizations are encouraged to sign the net zero carbon pledge and begin to adopt the roadmap to net zero carbon. https://www.netzerocarbonevents.org/

This is from a piece today by Mark Bittman – “The climate crisis is an actual crisis. No one treats it that way. Several years ago, Bill McKibben, one of the few imaginative people in this field that others sometimes listen to, suggested that we treat the climate crisis the way we treat a big war: gear up, rally the troops, attack. Defeat it. Some of my friends didn’t like that imagery, and I get it, but to me it makes more sense than the mindset that says, “Well, if we dither around, and small changes are made gradually, it won’t affect most of us.”
On the contrary, pals: You ignore ongoing and imminent peril at your own risk. I don’t know what you should be doing – making noise, at the very least, but this is the real shit.”
You can (and should) read the whole piece here
-https://www.bittmanproject.com/p/mark-bittman-climate-emergency?utm_source=substack&publication_id=175366&post_id=134700023&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false.
If we think that our industry, the event industry isn’t at risk and we continue to just dither and do the small stuff the consequences are unimaginable. We no longer have the luxury of working in silos, not having ambitious goals and roadmaps when it comes to sustainable events, not measuring our impacts and not taking seriously the impacts that live events have on the planet and the people that inhabit our world.
Let’s roll up our sleeves, rally the troops and get to work on creating a net zero event industry.