Sustainable event labels

Raw Data Now!
1

A team at Climathon 2019 is looking for any information about certification schemes for sustainable/eco-friendly events that have been the subject of research, data analysis or open data publication. I’m quite interested in the topic of events and their metadata, but don’t have too much experience in this particular context.

If you have any ideas, please add them to the thread. Here are a couple of leads that I have discovered:

The first link from Austria is a good example for a potential data source. There are plenty of websites listing events on eco-topics - and one could well imagine them going to some effort to illustrate this aspect - though I could not yet find any classifying general events on criteria like ISO 20121 - Sustainable events.

There are additional waypoints in research papers on the topic of environmental impacts and certification:

Alves, Lais & Freire, L. & Vazquez, E… (2016)

Guizzardi, Andrea & Mariani, Marcello & Prayag, Girish. (2017) :lock:

Vij, Mohit & Upadhya, Amitabh & Vij, Anu & Kumar, Manoj. (2019)

2

The ISO 20121 - Third Party Audit Registry has a shortlist of events with details about their conformance. I’m not sure how much value there would be to have access to this database, but it shows uses for such a tool. Besides that, there is a blog with interesting background such as this excerpt from an interview with the 2012 Olympic Games organizers:

“I certainly think that if ISO 20121 had existed in 2005 when we started, our work would have been so much easier. The biggest challenge was due to the scale of the project and the constant growth of LOCOG from a micro-enterprise to a major corporation in the space of seven years. Most events are, relatively, much simpler and have clearer boundaries, so ISO 20121 should be a valuable tool for most professional event organizers.
… Some of the key elements to get right early on are (a) establishing leadership commitment and putting sustainability into your governance structure, and (b) identifying your stakeholders and their main issues.”

3

One more example, probably the most accessible one I’ve seen from a consumer standpoint - though not quite there, from my limited perspective, in terms of methodological transparency and data access - is the ETH spinoff myclimate Foundation: