Sustainable Conference Planning: A Practical Guide for Company Events
Planning your annual company conference is an opportunity to bring colleagues together, share ideas and celebrate achievements. Whether you're organising a leadership gathering, a company-wide meeting or a multi-day conference, there's plenty to think about, from choosing a venue and arranging travel to organising catering and suppliers.
Alongside these decisions, more businesses are looking at how sustainability can become part of their conference planning.
The useful thing about considering sustainability early is that you have more opportunities to explore different options, ask suppliers the right questions and collect the information needed to understand your event's carbon footprint.
If you're planning a corporate event with sustainability in mind, this guide will help you consider the main areas of your conference, understand what information to collect and see how carbon measurement can support your decisions.
Why Make Sustainability Part of Your Conference Planning?
Sustainable conference planning means considering environmental, social and economic factors when organising and delivering an event.
For a company conference, this might involve choosing an accessible venue, reviewing travel options, discussing catering requirements and considering how materials and equipment will be used.
Carbon measurement is one part of this wider approach. It focuses on understanding the greenhouse gas emissions associated with activities such as travel, accommodation, venue energy and supplier services.
Measuring these emissions can help you identify which activities contribute to your conference's carbon footprint and where it may be useful to explore different options.
For businesses holding annual conferences, this information can also provide a starting point for reviewing future events.
If you're new to carbon measurement, our guide to measuring and reducing your event carbon footprint explains the wider process.
What Does Sustainable Conference Planning Involve?
Making sustainability part of corporate conference planning doesn't mean changing everything about how your event is organised.
Instead, it means considering sustainability alongside the practical decisions you're already making.
The international standard ISO 20121:2024 provides a framework for event sustainability management, covering environmental, social and economic considerations.
For your company conference, useful areas to consider include:
Venue: Accessibility, transport connections and energy consumption.
Travel: How colleagues and speakers will reach the conference.
Accommodation: Overnight stays and journeys between hotels and the venue.
Catering: Food choices, quantities and relevant waste.
Suppliers: Materials, equipment, deliveries and available activity data.
Carbon measurement: How you'll gather information and calculate the event's emissions.
These considerations can be built into your existing planning process, helping you approach sustainability in a practical and manageable way.
Step 1: Create Your Sustainable Conference Planning Checklist
When organising a conference with sustainability in mind, one of the most useful things you can do is identify what information you'll need before the event takes place.
Some information, such as employee travel bookings, may already be available through your usual planning arrangements. Other details may need to be requested from venues or suppliers.
Including these questions early can make collecting information for carbon measurement more straightforward.
Here's a practical checklist to work through as you organise your company conference.
Planning area | Sustainability considerations | Information to collect |
Venue | Accessibility, energy use and transport connections | Location, relevant energy data and facilities |
Attendee travel | Available transport options and journey distances | Starting locations, transport methods and journey details |
Accommodation | Overnight stays and hotel locations | Number of room nights and relevant hotel information |
Catering | Menu options, meal quantities and food waste | Number and types of meals, relevant waste data |
Materials | Printed items, signage and equipment | Material quantities, purchasing and hire information |
Suppliers | Deliveries, equipment and services | Relevant transport and activity data |
Event review | Understanding emissions and improving data | Calculated emissions, assumptions and data gaps |
This checklist provides a starting point rather than a fixed set of requirements. The information you need will depend on your conference and the activities included in your carbon footprint assessment.
Our guide to corporate event emissions explains more about the activities that can contribute to a company event's footprint.
Step 2: Choose a Conference Venue With Sustainability in Mind
Choosing the venue is often one of the biggest decisions in corporate event planning, and it's also an opportunity to consider sustainability from the outset.
Your venue's location can influence how attendees travel, while its facilities and energy requirements can contribute to the emissions associated with delivering your event.
For example, if colleagues are travelling from offices in Birmingham, Manchester, London and Edinburgh, you could compare potential locations based on the journeys people would need to make.
A venue with convenient public transport connections may give attendees more travel options, although the actual emissions will depend on how they travel.
When speaking to venues, consider asking:
Is the venue accessible by public transport?
Can the venue provide information about electricity, heating or fuel use?
Is energy consumption recorded separately for individual events?
What waste information can the venue provide?
Are suitable accommodation options available nearby?
For larger venues hosting several events at once, event-specific energy consumption may not be available.
In these situations, you may need to work with the venue to identify an appropriate way of estimating the energy associated with your conference.
The aim is to understand what information is available and how it could support your carbon footprint assessment.
Step 3: Consider Employee and Speaker Travel
Travel is an important consideration when planning a corporate event, particularly when colleagues are coming together from different offices or regions.
Depending on the conference, attendees may travel by train, car, coach or plane, with some requiring overnight accommodation.
The emissions associated with these journeys depend on factors such as travel distance, transport method and relevant vehicle characteristics.
As part of your sustainable conference planning, think about how you can collect the information needed to understand these journeys.
Useful details include:
Where attendees are travelling from.
Their destination and transport method.
Whether journeys are one-way or return.
Travel distances or route information.
Relevant vehicle occupancy information, where available.
You may already have some of this information through company travel bookings. Alternatively, a registration form or attendee survey could help you collect it.
For example, if your company is organising an annual conference for employees across several UK offices, you could gather travel information during registration rather than trying to reconstruct everyone's journeys after the event.
This can help you build a more complete picture of attendee travel emissions.
Our article on how to start tracking attendee travel emissions provides more detailed guidance.
You can also explore our sustainable event guest travel strategies when considering transport options.
Step 4: Plan Catering, Accommodation and Suppliers
Including sustainability in corporate conference planning also means considering the activities and services needed to deliver your event.
Catering, accommodation, materials and suppliers can all contribute to a conference's carbon footprint, depending on what's included in your assessment.
Accommodation
If colleagues or speakers are staying overnight, accommodation may need to be included in your conference carbon footprint.
Useful information includes the number of hotel room nights, hotel locations and any other details required by your chosen calculation method.
You might also consider the location of accommodation in relation to the venue, particularly if attendees will need additional transport between the two.
Materials and Suppliers
Conference materials can include printed programmes, signage, branded items, staging and audiovisual equipment.
As part of your planning process, consider whether suitable materials can be reused and what information suppliers can provide about purchased or hired items.
For example, a production supplier may be able to share equipment details, material quantities or information about relevant deliveries.
Our article on tracking Scope 3 supply chain emissions for events explains how supplier information can support event carbon measurement.
Catering
Food and drink are an important part of many company conferences, whether you're arranging refreshments for a one-day meeting or catering for a multi-day event.
When discussing options with your catering supplier, consider what information they can provide about meal quantities, menu types and relevant food waste.
For example, knowing how many meals were served and what types of meals were provided can give you more useful activity information than simply recording the total catering cost.
Our guide to event catering emissions explains what organisers can consider when collecting this information.
Step 5: Measure Your Conference's Carbon Footprint
Once you've gathered information about the activities involved in your conference, you can begin calculating the associated greenhouse gas emissions.
A conference carbon footprint represents the emissions associated with the activities included in your assessment.
Before calculating, you'll need to decide what the assessment covers. This is known as setting the measurement boundary.
For example, your boundary might include attendee travel, accommodation, venue energy, catering, materials and relevant supplier transport.
Recording which activities are included, along with any exclusions or assumptions, helps make the results easier to understand.
How Are Conference Carbon Emissions Calculated?
Carbon emissions calculations commonly involve combining activity data with appropriate emission factors.
Activity data describes an activity, such as the distance travelled by train or the amount of electricity consumed.
Emission factors are values used to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions associated with an activity.
A simplified calculation is:
Activity data × appropriate emission factor = estimated greenhouse gas emissions
The results are commonly expressed in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e), which allows the effects of different greenhouse gases to be represented using a common unit.
For relevant UK activities, the government publishes greenhouse gas conversion factors that can support emissions calculations.
It's important to select suitable factors and calculation methods for the activity, location and reporting period.
If you're new to the terminology, our article on what emission factors are explains the process in more detail.
What If You Don't Have All the Information?
When organising a conference, you may find that some activities are easier to measure than others.
For example, you might have detailed employee travel records but only estimated venue energy consumption.
Where appropriate, estimates can be used, provided you record the assumptions and calculation methods involved.
It's also important to distinguish estimates from calculations based on more detailed activity data.
Our guide to estimating carbon emissions explains how businesses can approach incomplete information.
Step 6: Use Your Results to Inform Future Conference Planning
For businesses organising an annual company conference, measuring emissions provides an opportunity to learn from one event and use that information when planning the next.
Once you've calculated your conference's carbon footprint, review which activities contributed to the overall result.
You might find that attendee travel deserves more attention, or that catering, accommodation or venue energy are areas worth investigating.
Depending on your event's requirements, you could consider:
Reviewing venue locations in relation to where attendees are based.
Exploring suitable public transport options.
Discussing catering quantities and menu choices with suppliers.
Reusing appropriate signage and event materials.
Requesting more detailed information from venues and suppliers.
These are potential opportunities to explore rather than guaranteed emissions reductions. The effect of any changes will depend on the circumstances and should be assessed using suitable data.
How Can You Compare Annual Conference Emissions?
If your company holds a conference every year, you can compare the emissions associated with different events.
However, it's important to account for differences in attendance, duration, location and the activities included in each assessment.
For example, a conference with 250 attendees may have higher total emissions than one with 100 attendees simply because more people are taking part.
You might also review emissions per attendee, alongside changes in the event's format and the quality of the data collected.
Keeping your measurement methods and boundaries consistent, where possible, can make comparisons more meaningful.
For businesses measuring emissions across their wider operations, our article on including corporate events in Scope 3 reporting explains how relevant event activities may fit into organisational carbon accounting.
How Scope Can Support Sustainable Conference Planning
At Scope Carbon Tracking, we believe understanding carbon emissions should be an accessible part of business and event planning.
Our Event Carbon Tracking offering supports organisers who want to measure and understand the emissions associated with their events.
For annual company conferences, carbon measurement can become part of the planning and review process, helping organisers build a clearer understanding of the activities contributing to their event's footprint.
You can also explore Scope's Event Carbon Calculator if you're looking for a starting point for measuring event emissions.
Measuring emissions doesn't automatically reduce them, but it can provide useful information when considering future planning decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sustainable Conference Planning
How Can I Make My Company Conference More Sustainable?
Start by considering sustainability during your conference planning process. Think about venue accessibility, attendee travel, catering, accommodation, materials and supplier choices.
Measuring your conference's carbon footprint can help you understand the greenhouse gas emissions associated with these activities and make more informed decisions.
What Contributes to a Company Conference's Carbon Footprint?
A company conference's carbon footprint may include emissions associated with attendee travel, accommodation, venue energy, catering, materials and relevant supplier activities.
The activities included will depend on the event and the measurement boundary used.
Can You Measure Conference Emissions After the Event?
Yes, travel bookings, venue information, accommodation records, invoices and supplier data can all help calculate emissions after a conference has finished.
However, including data collection in the planning process can make it easier to gather more complete information.
Why Is Carbon Measurement Useful for Annual Company Conferences?
Measuring emissions helps organisers understand which activities contribute to their conference's carbon footprint.
For annual events, retaining this information can also support comparisons between conferences and help identify opportunities to investigate during future planning.
Bringing Sustainability Into Your Next Company Conference
Whether you're organising a conference for 50 colleagues or bringing together teams from several locations, sustainability can become a practical part of your existing planning process.
By considering the relevant activities early, collecting useful information and measuring your conference's carbon footprint, you can build a clearer picture of the event and make more informed decisions.
For businesses holding annual conferences, this also creates an opportunity to learn from each event and improve the information available for future planning.
If you're preparing for your next company gathering, explore Scope's Event Carbon Tracking or visit the Event Carbon Calculator to find out more about measuring your event's emissions.
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