Celebrating Earth Day 2021: Report

30 Apr

SUMMARY REPORT

This report provides a summary of Positive Impact’s Earth Day 2021 celebrations and the many opportunities to participate throughout the day in advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

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Introduction

Earth Day is held annually on the 22nd of April in order to demonstrate global support for environmental protection. In recent years, Earth Day has become an opportunity to come together to tackle climate change, through sharing initiatives and ways to take action.

This Earth Day marked a historic moment for climate action, as President Joe Biden invited 40 world leaders to the Global Leaders’ Summit on Climate. During the summit, Biden unveiled an ambitious pledge to cut US carbon emissions in half by 2030.

WHAT WAS POSITIVE IMPACT'S APPROACH ?

As Biden stated, we are in a “decisive decade” to fix global warming. Time is running out to respond to the climate challenge. At current, there is a gap in the credibility of the event sector's communications because we do not have a science-based carbon target. Therefore, Positive Impact used Earth Day 2021 as an opportunity to close this gap and align the event sector with the many government and company announcements made that day.

Our focus was to raise £30,000 ($45,000/ €35,000) of funding to deliver stakeholder engagement so the event sector can create a Climate Action Framework, under the auspicies of UNFCCC Secretariat.

We created a number of opportunities for individuals, our ambassadors, companies and associations to participate in supporting the low-carbon future of the event sector and advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals:

Joining our community of over 1,400 ambassadors.
Hosting an hour of social media sharing examples of sustainability best practices.
Joining a roundtable on Plastic & the Event Sector with UNEP
‘Pay as much as you can afford’ for a tweet celebrating your personal action to be sustainable.
£800 ($1100/€930) for a company/ destination/ association tweet celebrating your personal action to be sustainable.
£100 ($135/ €110) one-off payment for EDUCATE.

Each of the above is an opportunity for ACTION. Why? Because throughout Earth Day we communicated this message:

"The time for conversation and consideration is over. The time for target setting and budget allocating is now. How can you take action that will make a difference?"

This Earth Day, the #eventprof community came together to tell the story of the power of events in achieving the UN SDGs. Over 20 hours, 14 hosts took to social media and reached an online community of 2 million using the hashtags #eventscreatchange and #earthday.

At the beginning and end of each hour, we encouraged hosts to share the importance of the event sector coming together to create a Climate Action Framework, under the auspices of UNFCCC Secretariat. Hosts shared a link to enable everyone to get involved.

> EXAMPLES

Download a booklet of the Earth Day best practice examples - this is a great resource if you are looking to take learnings from other event professionals on how to implement the SDGs at your events.

> THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR HOSTS:

Fiona Pelham - @FionaPelham
Positive Impact - @Pievents
Cerespo - @Pieventsjapan
IMEX - @IMEX_Group
Italian Special Occasions - @ISODMC
Martiz Global Events - @AmyKramer
Martiz Global Events - @RachaelMRiggs
Streamline Events - @Streamlinevents
Michele Fox - @Michelefoxnyc
Emili Subtil - @Emili942
Thrive Meetings - @tstuckrath
The EAIE - @TheEAIE
Messukesus - @BlomsterPaula
Soundings Connect - @SoundingsTalent

Supporting the creation of a Climate Action Framework for the Event Sector

Events bring people together and enable human interaction. In a post COVID-19 world, there is the opportunity for a new narrative on the important role of events - Governments and businesses could recognise the global event sector as a strategic enabler for participation and inclusion in decision-making (advancing SDG 16). *

To make this new narrative a reality for years to come, we need to take action to create a carbon target and reduction framework so future generations can still attend events.

Positive Impact and UNFCCC (the UN Body for Climate Change) are ready to support stakeholder engagement across the global event sector so everyone’s voice can be heard and all our initiatives can be counted.

There is a small funding gap of £30,000 ($45,000/ €35,000) to be closed and so our approach on Earth Day was a grassroots campaign to close this gap.

> Throughout Earth Day we raised £585 towards our target. This included £385 of 'pay as you feel' donations and £200 from our EDUCATE product.

> We also created a £800 ($1100/€930) opportunity for companies/ associations/ destinations to fund the framework, however we received no purchases.

Who did we reach out to?

We empowered our ambassador community with a toolkit to ask companies marketing their sustainability initiatives for funding
We reached out directly to 47 associations with this letter.
We engaged with over 30 corporate companies across Linkedin and Twitter throughout Earth Day asking them to support the framework

Plastic and the Event Sector with UNEP

During Earth Day, Positive Impact hosted a roundtable with UNEP exploring best practices surrounding plastic reduction which are important to advance the Sustainable Development Goals.

UNEP explained their plastic initiative and Positive Impact provided attendees with resources on how to address the role of plastic at their event.

Click to download the full report.

A summary of Earth Day: An interview with our CEO, Fiona Pelham

Listen to an interview with Positive Impact's CEO Fiona Pelham in which she provides a summary of what Positive Impact achieved this Earth Day and why Earth Day is so important for the event sector to build its reputation.