We can assist you, to make your events and your entire district climate-friendly. Both is described below.
Make your event climate-friendly
If you organise an event with many participants like a conference or a „Rotary Institute“ or „Summit“ it is a big opportunity to think about sustainability already in the planning stages and to make the event carbon neutral. The „Become Sustainable!“ project together with its partner „EndWarmingNow“ offers to support you with the planning and calculation. We have already made the 2024 conference of the German Rotaractors with 1.100 participants in Hamburg carbon neutral with our tools described on this website.
The steps to make your event CO2 neutral:
- Agreement between you and the „Become Sustainable!“ project to make an event carbon neutral.
- Already in the planning phase you can ensure that your event is “carbon-clever” by using many of the best practice proposals described in this book.
- In parallel please consider your resource consumption and use the very helpful „ESRAG green event handbook“ found here: https://esrag.org/green-events/
- Estimation of the expected footprint of the event based on the event plan – done by project „Become Sustainable!“.
- A suitable Rotarian compensation project is proposed by the „Become Sustainable!“ project and decided by you.
- During the preparation of the event the expected average amount of money, that will be necessary for CO2 compensation per participant is calculated based on the footprint estimation of the event and the chosen Rotary compensation project.
- When booking a ticket for the event the participants are encouraged to pay the compensation amount in advance.
- During or after the event the real CO2 footprint is calculated with the final number of participants etc.
- There is a short presentation during the event that introduces „Become Sustainable!“ and explains how the CO2 footprint of the event is calculated and compensated.
Please contact us via the email contact@becomesustainable.org – together with our partner “EndWarmingNow” we offer our assistance to make your event CO2 neutral!
Make your district climate friendly
After making your Rotary club climate-friendly and sustainable, the logical next step is to act on the level of the district. The „Become Sustainable!“ project will also support districts on their path to becoming climate-friendly. We have done this for the first time for Rotary year 2023/2024 in District 1842. The second pilot is planned for district 1900 in Rotary year 2024/2025. But these are not the first districts – at least one district has compensated its CO2 footprint of a Rotary year already: D2202 in Spain planted 8.000 trees as compensation for Rotary year 2022/2023, congratulations to PDG Ingrid Steinhoff, RC de Barcelona, District 2202 (Spain)!
To make your district climate-friendly some of the following steps could be helpful:
- Contact your District Governor and offer to start an environmental committee in the district (this exists already in many districts).
- Some districts also name a „District Environmental Officer“ (DEO).
- Start to collect all necessary data to calculate the CO2 footprint of your district. The calculation is feasible with the current version of our CO2 footprint online calculator already, after the first pilots we will make a few improvements to the online calculator to make the calculation easier.
- Enter all district committee meetings as regular or online meetings in the calculator.
- Enter all events organised by the district as separate events in the calculator.
- Currently all transportation and catering for district events can be calculated in the district calculation – in the future this can move to the club footprints if all clubs of a district are calculating and compensating their footprint.
- Compensate the CO2 footprint of the district with one of the Rotary projects described on our website.
- Spread information about the „Become Sustainable!“ project in the district and encourage all clubs to become climate-friendly and sustainable. District-events like district conferences offer a suitable platform for this.
Please contact us via email to contact@becomesustainable.org, we offer to assist you make your district carbon neutral!