Events and Sustainability

Kirsten Holmes, Michael Hughes, Judith Mair, Jack Carlsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317800262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Increasing concerns over climate and environmental change, the global economic and financial crisis and impacts on host communities, audiences, participants and destinations has reinforced the need for more sustainable approaches to events. Sustainability now features as part of the bid process for many mega-events, such as the Olympic Games, as well as significant regional and local events, where the event organisers are required by funding bodies and governments to generate broader outcomes for the locality.

This book is the first to offer students a comprehensive introduction to the full range of issues and topics relevant to event sustainability including impacts, operating and policy environments, stimulating urban regeneration and creating lasting legacies, as well as practical knowledge on how to achieve a sustainable event. Taking a holistic approach drawing on multidisciplinary theory it offers insight into the economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts and how these can be adapted or mitigated. Theory and practice are linked through integrated case studies based on a wide range of event types from mega events to community festivals to show impacts, best practice and how better sustainable practice can be achieved in the future. Learning objectives, discussion questions and further reading suggestions are included to aid understanding and further knowledge; additional resources for lecturers and students including power point slides, video and web links are available online.

Events and Sustainability is essential reading for all events management students and future managers.

PART I The events context

DOI: 10.9774/gleaf.9781315813011-2

Chapter 2 The internal and external environment for sustainable event organisers

DOI: 10.9774/gleaf.9781315813011-3

Learning outcomes

After studying this chapter you should be able to:

• Understand the complex environment within which event organisation takes place
• Analyse the internal and external environments for event organisers
• Identify tools for analysing the contexts within which event organisation takes place
• Conduct a stakeholder analysis for use by event organisers
• Identify the constraints and limits to organising sustainable events

Introduction

Chapter 1 sets out the definition of what is a planned event. Planned events operate in complex economic, environmental and social realities which involve a range of stakeholders beyond the event organisers, the performers or participants and the audience. These stakeholders can include the host community, the media, local, regional and national governments and special interest groups. Smith-Christensen describes a sustainable event as being ‘managed as an autonomous cyclical process through the interaction between event management, host community and event-goers’ (2009: 23).

This chapter examines the range of stakeholders involved in organising a planned event, the different environments involved in managing a planned event and the challenges these present to achieving sustainability within the events context.

The internal environment of an event

To begin with, however, we will examine the internal environment for managing an event and how this relates to sustainability issues. A planned event needs to be organised and the internal environment is constructed by the people who are organising this event. The people and the way they are organised will depend on the nature and scale of the event. For example, is the event a small, community event such as a school fete which is being organised by a committee of volunteers from the local area? Or is it a major international meeting of Heads of State, such as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), which requires substantial professional organisation, not to mention security measures? While these two very different events will have quite different stakeholders, the internal environment will actually be similar, but on a completely different scale. The internal environment for any planned event is summarised in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1 The internal environment for sustainable events

Organising any event involves the following elements:

People

Who will be involved in organising the event? Will it be paid, professional event organisers? Will it be a local sports club? Who will be staffing the event? Paid staff, hired for the event, paid staff redeployed from another event or function and/or volunteers? If the event is being organised by volunteers, is this sustainable? Can these individuals dedicate sufficient time to the event alongside their day to day paid jobs, families and other commitments? If the event is going to rely on volunteers, how will they be recruited, trained and managed to ensure that the event is delivered as required? Note that different staffing models are presented in Chapter 9.

Information technology

What information technology (IT) equipment will be required and sourced by the event organisers? Will any project management software be procured or can simple spreadsheets in programs such as Excel be used? How will the events team communicate with each other and other stakeholders? A major conference, exhibition, music festival or sports competition will each have specialist IT requirements. Have the costs for IT, IT support and power supplies for the equipment been included in the budget? Can power be sourced from a more sustainable supplier? See Chapter 6 for more details on the environmental impacts of events.

Equipment

What equipment will be needed for the event? If this is a one-off or occasional event, can the equipment be hired or borrowed? How will the equipment be powered? Again, can a more sustainable power supplier be sourced? Sourcing equipment from local suppliers, for example, will reduce carbon emissions from transporting it to the event site and LED lighting is a more energy-efficient option.

Materials

What materials will be needed both in the events office and for the event itself? Can materials such as advertising or set dressing be reused? Do physical flyers and tickets need to be provided? At the end of the event, what happens to the material? Are they stored away for future events or recycled where possible? The Sage Gateshead, an arts venue in the UK, provides a guide to making events more sustainable, which includes advice for minimising waste, such as using potted plants rather than cut flowers or avoiding one-use materials, including stage felting or carpets (http://www.sagegateshead.com/).

Space

Space refers to both the event organisers’ office environment (if there is one) and the setting. The appropriate venue is crucial to the staging of an event and will depend on the event theme and size. Different settings present different sustainability challenges. Increasingly, purpose-built venues are taking into account the environmental impact of their construction and operation. Newer venues can incorporate measures such as sensor lighting to limit electricity consumption or a moisture sensor system for watering the pitch as at Wembley Stadium, London (Harvey, 2009). Green-field venues offer alternative challenges. While there are fewer negative impacts associated with constructing a temporary venue, these sites can have limited public transport options and require temporary generators and toilets, which limits the sustainability measures that can be implemented (for some examples, see the case study of Peats Ridge Festival, Chapter 6). Of course some events require that the natural environment becomes the venue – for example a surfing competition must take place by the sea and event organisers need to give careful consideration for minimising the impact of the event on the fragile coastal environment.

Box 2.1 The Moscone Centre, San Francisco

The Moscone Centre, an exhibitions and conventions centre developed and owned by the City and County of San Francisco but managed privately, sets the standard for sustainable performance within the events sector. Some of their programmes include:

1. The centre began recycling material in 1998 and now recycles nearly 2 million pounds of material annually.
2. Their exclusive caterer, SAVOR, composts all organic waste from their kitchens and donates unused food to local not-for-profit organisations and also uses biodiesel fuel in their delivery vans.
3. Moscone West, an extension to the complex completed in 2003, features low emission glass to reduce energy loss.
4. The Moscone Centre employs a full-time air quality technician to continually monitor air quality.
5. In 2004, the centre installed solar panels on the roof which generate enough power for 500 homes.
6. The centre also installed energy efficient lighting and lightbulbs, which reduced energy consumption from lighting in the first year by up to 20 per cent.
7. Contractors of major projects are required to track and report their recycling and disposal of waste generated by the project.
8. The centre is located in the centre of San Francisco, close to local and regional transport and within walking distance of 20,000 hotel rooms, which enables event planners to minimise transport emissions generated by their event.

Source: http://www.moscone.com/mtgplanners/green_meetings.html

Vehicles

What vehicles will be needed to transport equipment and performers to the event site? Again, can these be borrowed or hired or can transport be outsourced? Given that transport is often one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions associated with an event (see Chapter 6), there are ways to minimise travel for the event organisers and performers by using other forms of transportation and/or choosing a venue with good public transport. For example, at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, the Olympic Village constructed a temporary train system for transport of accommodation modules as well as people.

Time

The schedule for the event and lead-in time needs to allow for sustainability concerns to be taken into account. For example, it may take longer to source suppliers of compostable food containers or to conduct consultation with the local community. Business Events Sydney, the convention bureau for Sydney and New South Wales provides advice for event organisers on managing their timeline here: http://www.businesseventssydney.com.au/plan-an-event/event-planning-toolkit/preparation/creating-a-timeline.cfm [accessed 12 November, 2014].

Scope of the event

Closely associated with the human, physical, resource, temporal and information scale of an event is the scope of an event, which requires parameters to be set around the following four variables:

1. Demographic scope. Who is associated with the event in terms of visitor profiles, business community members, staff and volunteers, competitors and performers, stakeholders, sponsors and partners? Should non-attendees within the event host destination be considered by the event organisers, or only those directly involved in the event?
2. Geographic scope. What are the spatial boundaries of the event and the associated economic impacts? Mobile events pose a particular challenge in this regard, whereas the boundaries for static events are more easily established. Do event destination and tourism destination boundaries coincide?
3. Temporal scope. Over what time frame will event impacts be generated? Again, events with a defined duration (such as sporting competitions and music festivals) are more easily assessed than those occurring over longer periods (such as art exhibitions). Similarly, visitor profiles can vary greatly between weekends and weekdays, so not all event days can be expected to generate the same impacts and outcomes. Some major events can also have a legacy that encourages increased numbers of people to visit the destination long after the event ends. The legacy that events leave behind is discussed in detail in chapter 12.
4. Economic scope. Visitors’, organisers’ and stakeholders’ expenditure at events can vary greatly in terms of incidence and impact, depending on the extent to which event inputs are sourced locally or imported and the extent to which regional, state or territorial, or national economies are affected by the event.

Understanding the internal and external environment of an event

If the internal environment is about the event organisation, the external environment is about the political, economic, social, technological, legal and ecological context within which the event operates. Various tools can be used by event organisers to assess the environment within which they are operating and identify the potential challenges to achieving sustainability. One framework used in strategic management of the broader environment within which a company operates is Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Ecological (PESTLE) analysis. In an events context, PESTLE analysis involves examining what factors in the external environment may have an impact on the event and therefore what action event organisers should take and what factors need to be monitored. The different components of a PESTLE analysis in relation to events are:

• Political – To what extent do the local, regional and/or national governments support and influence the event?
• Economic – What economic factors affect the costs and revenues of the event, such as the inflation, interest and exchange rates?
• Social – What are the different cultural and ethnic groups within the host population and what relationships do the event organisers need to foster with these groups?
• Technological – What technologies are available for organising, managing, staging, monitoring and evalu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• About the authors
• Preface
• Part I The events context
• Part II Impacts of sustainable events
• Part III Logistics of sustainable events
• 12 Creating sustainable legacies from events
• Part IV Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index