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Business and Law achieves carbon free conferencing

Thursday, 07 April 2022

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  • The carbon-neutral ANZAM conference included a keynote address attended both virtually and, by people in Perth, in person.

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Conferences can be incredibly valuable for sharing knowledge and building networks, but they can also have significant environmental impact – particularly if you’re flying to get there.

A team from the School of Business and Law (SBL) showed us that it doesn’t have to be this way!

In December 2021, SBL was getting ready to host the annual Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM) Conference, co-chaired by Professor Peter Galvin and Dr Andrei Lux.

With COVID-19 continuing to restrict entry to WA, the SBL organising team decided to host the first ever virtual ANZAM Conference with a face-to-face Keynote pre-event in Perth.

SBL is a signatory to the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). The School’s Director of PRME and Sustainability, Dr Mehran Nejati, is passionate about sustainability and as a member of the Conference organising committee helped create a ‘carbon-neutral’ event.

It was an ambitious goal but Dr Nejati is proud that it was achieved through emission avoidance and reduction, as well as offsetting initiatives. The virtual format enabled the organisers to avoid more than 63.5 tonnes of estimated CO2 emission which would have been generated from flights alone.

Dr Nejati then calculated the total CO2 emissions generated from the hybrid virtual event (49.1 tonnes), even factoring in the impact of email correspondence (350kg) and the emission production from the cloud servers (160kg).

The emissions were offset by planting 323 native trees and shrubs across Western Australia, in partnership with Trillion Trees.

Dr Nejati said that ‘this first attempt at making ANZAM conferences carbon neutral paves the way for future conferences to assess their social and environmental impact, and transparently report it to members’.

Projects such as this also provide valuable practical, real-world case studies for student learning, specifically on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and contribute to the realisation of SDG13 on climate action.

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