Since the events industry went largely virtual a year ago, this question has been rolling around in my mind: What is the environmental impact of virtual events? To be honest, I was a little scared to research it!
All the articles I had seen about virtual events and the environment were glowing reviews of how sustainable virtual events are compared to in-person events. I was worried that once I peeled back the layers, would I find that this was an assumption that overlooked important factors?
What are the factors used to determine the environmental impact of an event?
In general, these are the main factors used to gauge the impact that an event (or anything, really) has on the environment:
- Carbon emissions / greenhouse gas emissions
- Waste
- Water use
- Energy use
- Land use
- Direct effects on local ecosystem
For an in-person event, it’s easy to brainstorm the list of areas where we need to assess impact: things like food & beverage, travel, shipping, venue energy consumption, and material waste.
For virtual events, the aspects that affect the environment aren’t quite as tangible. Here are the factors I considered:
- Event website
- Video hosting & streaming
- Attendee device usage
- Shipped gifts to attendees
- E-waste and equipment lifespan
Each of these aspects of virtual events has an impact on the environmental factors listed above. For example, cloud server farms where websites and videos are hosted use a lot of energy, emit carbon, take up land, and use lots of water for cooling. Manufacturing, using, and disposing of electronic devices also has an impact in all of these areas.
There is not a huge body of academic research about the sustainability of virtual events. However, I found several good articles about information & communications technology in general, which is the broader category that virtual event technology falls into.
Here are my conclusions based on what I found:
1) In most cases, virtual events do have a lower environmental impact than in-person events.
Based on my research, virtual events are more sustainable than in-person events in most cases. The main factor that makes this true is reduced travel.
For the majority of in-person events, all attendees and exhibitors travel to a single meeting location. For events where attendees are coming from all over the country or from around the world, this travel is the largest component of an event’s carbon footprint. When this type of event goes virtual, long-distance travel is either totally eliminated or reduced to just a small production team.
While virtual components like your event website and video streaming do use energy and impact the environment, and estimates of the exact impact of these activities vary significantly, I didn’t find any studies that suggested the impacts of digital communication activities were anywhere close to the impact of long-distance travel.
In early 2020, many news outlets published articles reporting that video streaming causes dramatic amounts of carbon emissions. However, this analysis from Carbon Brief describes how these articles were largely based on a flawed study that over-estimated key data points and concludes that the impact of video streaming is more modest than those articles suggest.
Native, a company that has calculated the carbon footprints of many in-person and virtual events (and is our expert partner for our Carbon Offset service), has found consistently that virtual events have a smaller footprint than in-person events, even when conservatively over-estimating the carbon emissions from digital communication technology.
In addition to their reduced carbon footprint, virtual events also typically generate less waste due to less material fabrication and no large-scale food & beverage service. (Virtual attendees still drink water, use energy, and take up space wherever they are, so I don’t have enough information to make definite claims about the water use, energy use, or land use of virtual events vs. in-person.)
Finally, I qualify this conclusion with “in most cases” because it could be possible to have a greater environmental impact if your virtual event is of a dramatically larger scale than your original in-person event. An example would be if you previously planned a small local meeting with no air travel that is now a virtual event with thousands of attendees, a high level of AV production, and shipped swag boxes.
2) Hybrid events may have a higher impact on the environment, depending on how they are planned.
Even though virtual events almost always have a smaller environmental footprint than in-person events, hybrid events are another story entirely.
This is because the goal of many planners, following the pandemic, is to restore their previous in-person attendee numbers while also adding new virtual attendees to increase their audience. Planners should understand this would lead to a net increase of environmental impact, because you would be planning the regular in-person event and adding a new virtual event on top of that.
You may be tempted to compare this hybrid plan with a scenario where all of the new virtual participants hypothetically attend in person, which of course makes the hybrid option appear more sustainable. However, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s very unlikely that all of your new virtual attendees would have ever attended in-person. When assessing environmental impact, you should compare your plan to your current reality or realistic projections, rather than a hypothetical and unlikely scenario.
If you want to use a hybrid format to reduce the environmental footprint of your event, focus on shifting in-person attendees to the virtual attendance option, rather than retaining the same number of in-person attendees.
3) Regional hubs can greatly reduce the environmental impact of hybrid events.
Another way to make a hybrid event more sustainable is to adopt a regional hub model. Remember that long-distance travel is often the biggest component of an event’s carbon footprint. What if your attendees could experience your in-person event without having to fly to a single central destination?
In a regional hub model, you would plan two or more concurrent in-person events at locations that are conveniently located for the majority of your attendees, and then connect these hubs using virtual meetings technology.
In this article, scholar Vlad C. Coroama cites the example of the 2009 World Resources Forum, which occurred at connected hubs in Davos, Switzerland, and Nagoya, Japan. This conference successfully reduced intercontinental travel by offering attendees the ability to attend via a shorter trip within their own continent.
To realize the greatest reduction in your environmental footprint, analyze where your attendees are coming from and plan your hubs for the most efficient locations, with a particular focus on reducing long-haul flights across continents or between continents.
Note that as you decrease the travel barrier to attend, you should expect an increase of overall attendance compared to a single-location format. (This is known as a “rebound effect” that occurs when things become easier or cheaper to do.) The two-location 2009 World Resources Forum event saw an increase in total attendance, but these new attendees generally made shorter trips that had a lower total impact than the travel that would have occurred for fewer attendees to all travel to a single location.
As you adopt regional hubs, continue to monitor how far your attendees are traveling and adjust hub locations for future events as needed to minimize travel.
Additional tips for reducing the environmental impact of your virtual events:
- Avoid purchasing new hardware and equipment to facilitate virtual and hybrid events. Seek out used equipment or rentals.
- Printing on paper has a much lower impact than buying new iPads that will only be used a few times. Only invest in owning hardware if you have a plan to use it regularly.
- Keep the devices you own for longer and upgrade less frequently.
- Encourage attendees to use smaller devices and screens, which use less energy.
- Use a green hosting company for your event website.
- Decrease the file size of your graphics, photos, and videos. Transmitting larger files generally consumes more energy.
- Remind attendees to turn off their video and microphone when not interacting.
- Mindfully plan any shipments to participants to minimize their impact. Make all shipped gifts optional, seek attendee feedback to ensure any gifts are valuable to your audience, and purchase carbon offsets for the footprint of shipping. UPS offers a carbon-neutral shipping option, as do other services like Sendle.
- Schedule screen-free breaks and let attendees know they can turn off their screens for a set amount of time without missing any programming. Suggest healthy ideas like taking a walk around the block, reading a book for 15 minutes, stretching, doing breathing exercises or yoga poses, or simply looking out the window. These break ideas are good for your attendees’ eyes, brains, and carbon footprints.
What other questions do you have about the environmental impact of virtual and hybrid events? Let me know in the comments! (This post is already super-long, but I have tons of background info I didn’t include and would be happy to share in response to questions.)