Going Carbon Neutral

For today’s Event Manager it is not enough to be super organised, with the stamina of an athlete and the heart of an artist, you must now also be environmentally aware.  However over the last year, this increasing awareness of the impact of what we do on the environment has had to be weighed up against the tightest budgets many of us have had to work with in over a decade and the pressure to do both can leave even the most poised event manager a little hot under the collar.
Thankfully the Australian Centre for Event Management (ACEM) has come to the rescue (at least when it comes to the environment) with a free carbon calculator, designed with the needs of event producers and organisers in mind. 
Developed in association with the Carbon Reduction Institute, the free ACEM Carbon Calculator allows event managers to measure the carbon impact of events, and offers direction on what steps the event manager/planner can take to reduce carbon emissions.  The easy to use, online calculator provides an invaluable resource to those of us working in the events industry and it can be used in consultation with your client, so that decisions can be made about what works with the budget and what does not.
Along with the calculator, there is practical advice on what steps Event Planners can take throughout the planning process to reduce overall impact in the areas of catering, transport and energy use.  There is even an option to link to a payment gateway, giving organisers the choice of offsetting their carbon footprint once it is calculated, in order to create a carbon neutral event.
We all understand why we need to care for the planet, but when it comes to event planning there are so many decisions to be made that doing this can become an overwhelmingly difficult task.  This may be why the industry has so far been a little slow to embrace carbon neutral strategies.  A tool like the Carbon Calculator goes a long way to making this task much simpler and is something we within the industry