Measure the carbon footprint from your meeting or event

As most human activity, meetings and events also comes with a footprint. The most notable negative footprint from meetings or events is often the carbon footprint associated with hosting the meeting/event. Here we will give you a few tips on how this footprint can be measured.

Measuring is the first step towards reducing the negative footprint from meetings or events, and possibly also offsetting the footprints that are difficult to reduce. 

Photo: Visit Bergen / Grim Berge, Natural Light AS – visitBergen.com 

Use a recognized certification scheme

The best way to measure the carbon footprint from your meeting or event is to follow the guidelines and be validated through a third-party certification scheme. We recommend one of the following certifications schemes:

• Eco-Lighthouse’s and their criteria set for green conferences or green events, 
• AGF Greener Festival 
• AGF Greener Events 

These schemes all come with the option of a carbon footprint report.  

Calculate the carbon footprint

If you for some reason don’t have the opportunity or capacity to certify your meeting or event, you could use one of many solutions to calculate a carbon footprint.  We recommend this calculator:

-  MyClimate Event calculator 
The largest carbon footprint from a meeting or event is often the (scope 3) emissions related to the participants transportation to and from the meeting/event. If you have data on how many participants attended your event and where these participants travelled from, it is also possible to just measure the transport related emissions. For this we recommend:
-  CO2rism (in Norwegian) 

You now have the tools to calculate the carbon footprint from your event or meeting, and once you have worked to reduce your footprint, you could opt to offset or cancel some of your negative impacts.