How to assess events’ environmental impacts: a uniform life cycle approach

Abstract

Green practices are becoming the rule in events and tourism, and many event organizers are rebuilding their operations around sustainability management systems. In this process, assessing events’ environmental impacts is crucial to define improvement strategies. Recently, researchers have proposed several quantitative methods to conduct the environmental assessment of an event, but some issues prevented their uniformity and generalizability, including the lack of a wide scope of assessment, of multi-event testing and multi-actor perspective. This paper identifies life cycle assessment (LCA) as the most comprehensive methodology and builds a uniform approach to evaluate the environmental impacts of any event. It is based on an innovative model that maps the event life cycle to identify its ecological hotspots in a way that increases transparency, comparability among different events, and accountability of different stakeholders. To generate it, the LCA was conducted in different event case studies within a multi-actor perspective. This was enabled by the collaboration with the municipality of a large European city, leveraging its involvement in many events with multiple roles in their supply network.

Keywords:

• Event management
• event tourism
• sustainable events
• environmental impacts
• life cycle assessment
• environmental sustainability

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Municipality of Padova and particularly the Department for Environment and Territory and the Office for Public Entertainment Compliance for their precious collaboration in the data collection and the support throughout the research project.

Notes

1 The EU Covenant of Mayors is an agreement launched in 2008 and recently renewed that brings together thousands of local governments voluntarily committed to achieving and exceeding EU climate and energy objectives.