In the spirit of 'Walking the talk', and building on their own best practice, GreenDependent organised the Budapest General Assembly Meeting with the active cooperation of all partners with view to it having as small a carbon impact as possible.
After reducing the impact as much as currently possible, the EU 1.5° Lifestyles consortium calculated the carbon footprint of ithe Meeting in May 2024. Let's see what the results are...
The total carbon footprint of the meeting - including travel, food, organisation and direct energy use - was 8.33 tCO2 for the 30 participants (278 kgCO2/capita).
Important note: the carbon footprint related to accommodation and food consumption outside the meeting (e.g. breakfasts and dinners) are not included in this calculation.
As we had partners coming from all over the EU and some from the very 'other end' of the continent (Spain), or hard to reach by public transport places, we expected that the largest part of the meeting footpring would be linked to travel:
On the one hand, this 97.5% seems to be extensive taking into accont that it was a 3-day-long meeting, but on the other it was also realsitic, as we paid special attention to only having mostly vegan or vegeterian dishes during the meeting days.
Looking at the travel data in its own (8.13 tCO2), we can see that flying is responsible for the largest part of the travel related footprint:
Even though only 8 people travelled by plane - and the rest by train or other means -, flying was responsible for 87.3% of the total travel footprint, and 85% of the total footprint of the meeting. 15 participants travelled by train or bus (e.g. from Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden) their share is only 12.4%! of the total travel footprint. The rest of the participants were from Hungary.
Part of the German team on the train homeward bound
Finally, as we have stated above, strong emphasis was put on serving food that is 1.5° Lifestyles compatible, hence the tiny amount of meat. Below we can see the data for the food/catering part of the carbon footprint in detail:
Catering from sustainable catering companies, which are also members of the Heroes of Responsible Dining Association in Hungary
We hope, our next mettings' per capita footprints will be even smaller and that we can adapt even more from our principles and best practicie. 😊
GreenDependent - together with the consortium members - will compensate this meeting emission by planting native fruit trees in Hungarian educational and social institutions in the framework of its TreeDependent programme.
Kristóf Vadovics, GreenDependent Institute