Car­bon Foot­print

An event’s car­bon foot­print means the cli­mate emis­sions caused by human actions at the event. In addi­tion to car­bon diox­ide, these green­house gas emis­sions include methane and nitrous oxide. Emis­sions from event pro­duc­tion form from ener­gy con­sump­tion, trav­el, waste, pur­chas­es and food and drink. Reduc­ing an event’s cli­mate impact is only pos­si­ble when the event’s emis­sion sources are iden­ti­fied and a real­is­tic and goal-ori­ent­ed plan can be made for reduc­ing them.

You can learn to cal­cu­late event emis­sions your­self with the help of ready-made cal­cu­la­tors or Excel tem­plates. It is a rec­om­mend­able to pre­pare for cal­cu­lat­ing a car­bon foot­print by sort­ing out what infor­ma­tion is need­ed on dif­fer­ent areas. In a vis­i­tor sur­vey, it is impor­tant for exam­ple to include ques­tions about the audi­ence’s trav­el habits and fre­quen­cies. The Eng­lish Julie’s Bicy­cle’s organization’s free cal­cu­la­tor is also suit­able for mea­sur­ing event emis­sions. Nat­u­ral­ly, you can have the cal­cu­la­tion entire­ly made by pro­fes­sion­als, and many com­pa­nies do offer cus­tomized car­bon foot­print cal­cu­la­tions for event orga­niz­ers.

In The Most Sus­tain­able Euro­pean Cap­i­tal of Cul­ture project, the car­bon foot­prints of six events and one event space were cal­cu­lat­ed. The events were the Oulu-based Qstock, Var­jo fes­ti­val, Frozen Peo­ple and Lumo Light Fes­ti­val, Bät­tre Folk in Hailu­o­to and NUTS Karhunkier­ros and Sol­stice in Kuusamo. The car­bon foot­print of Ouluhal­li was cal­cu­lat­ed as part of the event space car­bon foot­print.

Lisäti­etoa ja ‑vinkke­jä

Some cities offer car­bon foot­print cal­cu­la­tors for events on their web­site. View the City of Helsin­ki car­bon foot­print cal­cu­la­tor.