Events’ Environmental Sustainability: Impact Assessments and New Perspectives in the Digital Age

Events represent a fast-growing sector in the service industries and event management has gained its status as a standalone discipline in the management field. In the last two decades, environmental sustainability has emerged as a popular trend in events, as witnessed by the widespread diffusion of the notion of “green event” among practitioners and the proliferation of academic contributions on the topic. This is due to the increasing awareness of their environmental consequences. On the one hand, indeed, events can cause large direct negative impacts on the environment (e.g., resource overuse, waste generation, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.). On the other, they can also be used to convey green messages to attendees, leading to an indirect environmental benefit. This doctoral thesis contributes to the literature on events’ environmental sustainability, with a specific focus on the assessment of the environmental impacts of events and the effect of new digital technologies in the sector. The thesis begins by conducting a systematic literature review of the studies on the topic and mapping them into homogenous thematic streams. This allows for the uncovering of several research gaps. One concerns the lack of consistency in the tools used to evaluate events’ environmental impacts – mostly life cycle assessments (LCA) – which makes it hard to compare the findings across different studies and events. Another regards the unclear effect on the environmental impacts and perceived value of events because of the shift to virtual formats, as made recently popular by the Covid-19 pandemic. To address the first gap, a multiple case study methodology is adopted. Particularly, the LCA technique is implemented in multiple events with different features, and, based on the comparison of the different implementations, a consistent assessment approach is derived to conduct LCA in any event – both in in-person and virtual formats. The approach revolves around two innovative models (one for in-person and one for virtual) that map the event life cycle into a predefined set of processes and thus enable the identification of its environmental hotspots in a more comparable way. The models further provide event stakeholders with a valuable framework to map their supply networks from a managerial standpoint. To address the second gap, a convenience sample of events that shifted from in-person to virtual formats because of the pandemic is selected and the variation that occurred in their environmental impacts and perceived value is investigated. To quantify the former, the models developed in the first part of the research are implemented in the in-person and virtual versions of the events. To quantify the latter, a mixed-methods approach is adopted, involving 15 interviews to identify the main components of value for the attendees of the selected events, and a survey to gauge their perceptions of the value of the two formats (555 responses). Results show that event virtualization strategies can lead to a huge environmental saving – considering the carbon footprint, from around 942 to 1 kg CO2eq per person for the studied events. On the other hand, they can also lead to a substantial utility loss – the overall value decreased from 7.9 to 4.0 on a scale from 0 to 10. The limitations of the research are discussed, along with their implications for practice and future research. From a managerial perspective particularly, the results imply that event organizations – especially those targeting attendees traveling long distances – will hardly achieve ambitious decarbonization targets without relying on virtual formats. To maintain an acceptable utility for their customers, though, they could allocate resources to innovate virtual formats (e.g., through augmented reality) and/or test hybrid events that combine in-person and virtual formats to leverage the benefits of both.