Intermediate Environmental Impacts

Measures of intermediate environmental impact include:

  • Proportion of total attendees driving to/from the event by car
  • Number of visitors using public transport
  • Total kilometers travelled to event by participants
  • Attendees who believed the event worked to promote sustainability objectives
  • Attendees who believed event efficiently managed waste streams and adopted means of reducing attendee carbon footprint
  • Proportions of attendees asserting that event attendance will have an impact on their environmental behaviours
  • Total CO2 emissions per event attendee
  • Total energy consumption per event/attendee

 

Overview & Considerations

Intermediate-level environmental impacts tend to focus around measurement of people’s activities and perceptions around an event.

If an event has tried hard to promote environmental best practice then it could be valuable to measure the impact this has had on spectators and attendees – firstly in terms of whether this has been noticed, and secondly around whether people intend to change their own environmental behaviour as a result.

In terms of people’s environmental activity around an event, it is relatively straight-forward to put in place tools which provide good benchmarks for organisers to measure year-on-year, for example total miles traveled by car/public transport. For certain events, organisers or funders may want to go one step further and translate people’s responses into more formal measures of CO2 emissions.

Primarily these impacts will be secured through survey work. In the case of developing specific measures around areas such as carbon or waste, it will typically be necessary to use a specialist contractor who will be able to design appropriate survey tools, and who will be skilled in converting those responses into formal measures.