The NCPC undertook an exercise to measure the carbon footprint of its conference in September. Making use of a locally developed platform, the NCPC conducted a survey, and used venue and delegate travel information to measure and report on the GHG emissions associated with the two-day event. The results showed clearly that the greatest contributor to GHG emissions was travel, in particular international air travel, contributing 179.58 of the total event footprint of 190.545 tCO2e. The full report is available on the conference website.
The NCPC and Veriport team made use of methodologies and approaches aligned to the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and World Resources Institute (WRI & WBCSD, 2015).
The scope of the carbon footprint report includes the GHG activities of the Sustainable Industries Conference South Africa, held on September 11th & 12th, 2024 at the CSIR Convention Centre, Pretoria. Categories of emissions calculations included: purchased goods and services, upstream transportation, fuel-and-energy-related activities, waste generated and business travel.
Business travel included the air travel of 48 international guests, as well as 40 staff and speakers from other provinces in South Africa. This category accounted for 94.2% of the total GHG emissions associated with the event. International travellers had an average intensity of 2.66 tCO2e/traveller, whilst the domestic air travellers had an intensity of 0.57 tCO2e/traveller.
The CSIR International Convention Centre, which is a venue to strives for environmentally sustainable business practices, provided all the information needed to assess the footprint of the venue-related emissions, and the NCPC’s communication team included items such as branding and collateral printed for the event.
“All-in-all, it was an enlightening experience,” says NCPC Operations and Communication Manager Julie Wells. “With a good reporting platform and some sound advice, any organisation can gain insight into the GHG emissions of their business practices; it is a lot simpler than you might think.”
According to Wells, the NCPC has requested a quotation for the purchasing of carbon credits to offset the impact of the travel.
“We will definitely be undertaking carbon footprinting of our events in future, and we encourage all our partners to do likewise,” she concluded.
The NCPC has made the report available on the conference website, which also has all the presentations and recordings of the conference sessions.
Visit https://www.industrialefficiency.co.za/conference/ – or email ncpc@csir.co.za
The platform used for the report can be viewed at ESG & Carbon Software | Veriport
