Events industry reflects on sustainability progress on Earth Day

The events industry is reviewing its impact on the environment and celebrating initiatives towards creating a more sustainable industry, as it looks to take action on this year’s Earth Day, 22 April. Earth Day is an annual event that raises awareness for people, industries and governments to support environmental protection. Six months after COP 26, the events industry is taking Earth Day as an opportunity to reflect on its progress and take steps enact sector wide change. In business travel, Etihad Airways is completing a week of intensive flight tests to reduce carbon emissions. The week includes over 20 commercial flights that test contrail avoidance technologies in partnership with SATAVIA, a UK-based green aerospace company. The airline will also operate up to 13 dedicated ‘EcoFlights’ testing a range of flight and engine optimisation initiatives, with successful trials to be incorporated into regular scheduled operations. Each of these flight tests will be operated on Etihad’s fleet of fuel-efficient A350 and 787 aircraft, spearheaded by the ‘Etihad Greenliner’, and Etihad’s newest aircraft, the ‘Sustainable 50’. For event organisers, since the events industry is emerging from pandemic, hybrid events have become increasingly prevalent. Research published in the Nature Communications journal states that going hybrid has the potential to curb an event’s carbon footprint by 66%. The UK-based event technology platform, Hopin echoed this research, stating that organisers, on Earth Day, should start to think about using integrated technologies to help run events in more sustainable ways. UK-based sustainable body isla, has also launched this week TRACE, a purpose-built carbon measurement platform dedicated to the event industry. TRACE captures and reports emission and waste data from live, hybrid and digital events. The mission behind TRACE is to support the events industry transition to Net Zero by empowering event managers with knowledge and data to make better decisions. However, a recent report by event tech scale-up, HeadBox has revealed almost one in five (18%) companies are still ignoring sustainability according to their employees. This is even higher when it comes to company events, with 80% of workplaces not running sustainable meetings and events. While key players are attempting to take action throughout the events sector on Earth Day, HeadBox’s Report suggests the continued need for environmental awareness and efforts to become a more sustainable industry.