The power of live experiences to bring people together and create lasting change can’t be overstated. Replicating the effect of a captive audience sharing a live experience entirely virtually is a really tall order.
However, the events industry is in an uncomfortable place right now. As we continue our recovery from the decimation wrought by COVID, we’re having more and more difficult conversations around environmental sustainability. In some ways, Covid-19 has even set us back; we’ve had to reintroduce single-use items at events like hand sanitiser and face-masks.
At the same time, the pandemic has force-delivered our professional audiences a crash course in attending virtual events. That means businesses are thinking much more carefully about whether they need to travel to an event at all, especially considering the carbon footprint of travel. If, as an industry, we want to secure our future, we must stop looking the other way and accelerate the move towards a more sustainable future for events.
That’s where non-profit organisations such as isla come in. Founded by event professionals and industry leaders (full disclosure: WRG is a founding member), isla is focussed on achieving a sustainable future for events by standardising measurement, meeting new demands from clients and consumers, and accelerating the pace of change. Through training and working groups, isla is helping us innovate, share knowledge, and apply wider sustainability initiatives and innovations to our industry more widely and effectively.
isla has also developed TRACE, a real-time carbon impact reporting tool that quantifies the carbon impact of experiences and provides suggestions for effective reduction and offset. WRG is one of the first adopters of this tool, which is being embedded throughout our processes and we’re excited to see the difference it will help us make.
Knowing the impact of events is just the first step in making a change. To create lasting impact around environmental sustainability, we must work in collaboration with all our stakeholders; from employees and suppliers to clients and partners.
Trying to imagine and engineer a sustainable future for events isn’t easy, and it can lead to uncomfortable conversations (for example, changing the guest experience in the name of sustainability), but the truth is that real change usually only happens when you’re at your most uncomfortable.
Talk to an expert about reducing the impact of your events here, no strings attached.