Calling All Event Professionals
With rising expectations from clients, delegates, sponsors and suppliers, sustainability is no longer a “nice to have” when it comes to organising events—it’s a necessity. Measuring the carbon footprint of your event is a key first step in demonstrating accountability and progress. But let’s be honest: it’s not always easy.
Events are complex. They often involve dozens of stakeholders, multiple venues or build stages, international delegates, and a host of suppliers. But one thing is clear: understanding and reducing the environmental impact of your event is essential and increasingly expected. The good news? You don’t have to tackle it alone.
Why Measuring Matters
Whether you're running a conference, exhibition, product launch or internal project, measuring the carbon footprint helps you:
- Understand your environmental impact
- Identify where the biggest emissions come from
- Engage suppliers and visitors in your sustainability goals
- Track improvements over time
- Demonstrate action to stakeholders, clients and funders
Crucially, measuring carbon emissions allows you to move from good intentions to concrete, trackable results.
Start With Visitor Travel
One of the biggest contributors to an event’s carbon footprint is visitor travel. Flights, train journeys, taxis, car use… they all add up, especially for large-scale or international events. That’s why it’s so important to measure this aspect accurately and comprehensively.
The GCS Visitor Travel Calculator can help you do just that. Easily embedded into your visitor registration process, it allows attendees to log how they’re travelling and calculates the associated emissions. It’s a powerful way to engage your audience and show your commitment to sustainability from the very first interaction.
Don’t Forget the Build
Event Infrastructure?
Another significant contributor to your event’s footprint will be the built elements or any other contracted services—materials used, transport to site, temporary infrastructure and power. Capturing this data can be a challenge, particularly if you’re relying on different suppliers to provide information.
The GCS Event Project Build Calculator simplifies this process. Designed to be quick and accessible (via laptop or mobile on site), it enables you and your suppliers to enter key build data, helping you track the carbon impact of your set-up in real time. While it’s tailored for events, it can be used for any project-based activity.
And of course …don’t forget the Hospitality
Food and Beverage, whether simple snacks and hot drinks, or full meals and drinks, may also be a key part of your event success - but it all has a footprint. F&B data is notoriously difficult to gather, but again the GCS calculator tools facilitate meaningful inputs and results, no matter how crude your available data may be.
Bring It All Together
To get a complete picture, GCS offers the Event Calculator, which combines visitor travel, build data and any other relevant inputs to provide a clear, accurate view of your event’s total carbon footprint. It’s a fast and easy way to meet growing stakeholder demands and set a benchmark for improvement.
Getting Started: Practical Tips
- Start early – Integrate carbon measurement into your event planning timeline from the beginning.
- Engage suppliers – Ask them to share data about materials, transport and energy use. GCS can help you build sustainability into your supply chain approach.
- Be transparent – Let your delegates and stakeholders know you’re measuring impact, and why. It builds trust and credibility.
- Don’t worry about perfection – Your first carbon footprint calculation may not be 100% accurate. That’s okay. What matters is that you’ve started—and that you’re learning.
- Track progress – Measuring the footprint of every event enables you to spot trends, reduce emissions over time, and communicate your sustainability journey clearly.
It’s Bigger Than One Event
When you start asking questions about emissions, materials and transport, you’re not just improving the sustainability of one event—you’re encouraging others to do the same. Suppliers take notice. Delegates respond. Small changes at the project level can ripple outward creating a bigger impact.
Talk to Us
At Green Circle Solutions, we work with organisations to measure, reduce and communicate the carbon footprint of events and projects. Our suite of tools, including the GCS Event Calculator, Visitor Travel Calculator and Project Build Calculator, is designed to make your sustainability journey easier, more effective and more impactful.
Ready to get started? Get in touch to find out how we can help you measure what matters—and improve event on event.