As a public health community, we are acutely aware of the on-going climate crisis and the impact it has on public health globally. Therefore, we have committed ourselves to reducing the environmental impact of our annual conference, with the aim of going net zero. On this page, we would like to describe what we have done so far to reduce the conference’s impact on the climate, and what our plans are to take this aim forward for the 2023 conference and beyond.
1. What are the climate impacts of our conference?
We have convened a low carbon conferencing sub-committee each year since 2020.The first task of this committee was to take stock of the emissions associated with the conference, and come up with ways to reduce them. For this, we have been drawing on previous work by others, such as The International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations 2018 conference, the European Biological Rhythms Society 2019 conference, and commentary in the Lancet Planetary Health.
This showed that the main impacts of the conference were emissions associated with the conference venue itself, including catering, food waste, and energy usage; travel and accommodation of speakers and delegates; hire and transport of the poster boards and AV equipment; the conference and registration websites; publication of the conference abstracts; and the delegate packs.
2. What have we done so far to mitigate these impacts?
To reduce our emissions associated with the venue, we try to book venues with sustainable credentials. For example, our 2023 conference will be held at 15Hatfields, which is one of the most sustainable venues in London.
About a third of all greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food production and food waste, with meat-based diets one of the biggest offenders. Since 2019, we have therefore made all catering at the conference vegetarian or vegan. Our first conference dinner in 2022 was also entirely vegetarian. We ask our venues to provide tap water for our delegates, to reduce our consumption of bottled water and single-use plastics.
We have also reduced the conference materials we hand out to delegates. Since 2021, the conference abstracts are no longer printed in a hardcopy abstract booklet, but are only available online. We no longer give out delegate packs with pens, leaflets, and notepaper. The programme booklet for the day has been reduced to a pocket size which fits into the delegate badge holders. We ask delegates to return their badge holders and lanyards at the end of the day to be reused.
Despite these important steps to reduce our environmental impact, it is almost inevitable that there will be some emissions associated with the conference. Each year, we estimate the remaining emissions, such as for the online hosting of our websites and conference abstracts and delegate travel (assuming public transport was used). We generously round up this number and offset these remaining emissions through the UN Carbon Offset Platform. Since 2021, we have offset the equivalent of 7 tonnes of CO2 by sponsoring the DelAgua Public Health project in Eastern Africa.
3. What are our plans for the future?
We have tried to minimise the biggest climate impacts associated with the conference over which we as organisers have direct control. There is still more that can be done, however. In 2022, we asked our delegates for the first time how far they had travelled to the conference and what mode of transport they used and we will continue to do this to monitor how delegates travel to our conference. For 2023, we ask delegates at the point of registering for the conference how they intend to travel to the conference, to raise awareness of the impact of travel.
4. What did not make the cut, and why?
There are a few things that we have considered on our journey to reduce our environmental impact that we have not (yet) adopted:
For the 2022 conference, we considered providing our delegates with vouchers to a shared bicycle scheme to cover the last mile(s) within Glasgow to the venue by bike. We ended up deciding against this because we expected most delegates would bring an overnight bag or suitcase and/or sensitive equipment such as laptops and would not be able (or want) to cycle with these items. We were also unsure if the Scottish weather at the end of November would make cycling seem like an appealing option to our delegates. We also recognised that some people would not feel safe or confident cycling without a helmet or in an unfamiliar city. We will continue to engage with our delegates to assess their appetite for using shared bicycle schemes to get to and from the conference venue in the future. In the meantime, we encourage our delegates to use public transport to get to the conference venue, or share taxis where possible.
A lot of our delegates have suggested the possibility of a hybrid conference, and have pointed out that being able to join the conference online would bring both environmental and accessibility benefits. Environmental benefits because it reduces the need for delegate travel and accommodation. Accessibility benefits because it would make the conference more accessible to people who are unable to join in person due to ill health, caring responsibilities, or other reasons. Although we absolutely agree with them and have given this suggestion serious consideration, the cost involved in organising a hybrid conference has proven prohibitive. The increase in delegate fees to cover these additional costs would make the conference less accessible to a lot of other delegates, such as students and trainees. We have therefore had to decide that at present we cannot offer a hybrid conferencing experience. We will continue to monitor this for future editions of the conference.
We always welcome new ideas to help us reduce our environmental impact – so if you’d like to share an idea or best practice, please do get in touch! (contact details can be found on the About Us page)