Conferences
Account for your event's travel emissions and support eco-projects in your host communities.
Conferences educate and engage participants on a multitude of topics. They also provide great opportunities to combat climate change, especially in relation to participants’ unavoidable travel emissions. “Neutralizing” these emissions through purchasing carbon offsets, however, has a slew of challenges and offsets have often been compared to guilty “indulgences” where parishioners could pay the church to absolve them of their sins. Rather than “buy a clean conscience”, Earth Deeds enables you to onset your conference’s travel emissions and support local solutions to global warming. Here’s how onsetting works:
Create a “Team”: A Team is any size group connected through a common event or activity. We can set up Teams for each of your conferences or events and an organization page to keep track of all your Teams.
Choose a Project: We can help you (and/or your participants) identify local sustainability initiatives in that are doing good work and can add meaning to your event. Projects are not limited to ones mitigating CO2 and we have a database of over 100,000 projects if you need help in finding one.
Measure Emissions: We provide you with custom calculators, materials, and reports to engage your participants in measuring, understanding, and tracking their travel emissions. We’re happy to offer technical support as needed.
Contribute Funds: Participants contribute online and account for their unavoidable emissions based on the social cost of carbon, which is the best scientific estimate of the actual costs of emitting greenhouse gases. We also provide crowdfunding tools to solicit additional funding if desired.
Support the Project: We transfer collected funds to the projects you choose. Earth Deeds is free for you to use and retains a 15% fulfillment fee to enhance our capacity to combat climate change, pay bank fees, and help other organizations become carbon conscious.
Celebrate: We offer social media tools to promote your efforts and the projects you are supporting. We also can provide a Carbon Conscious ecolabel you can display on your website and materials.
Example #1 A conference invites participants to onset their travel emissions and capitalize a sustainability award. Member institutions submit project profiles, which are voted on by conference attendees.
Example #2 Conference organizers invite participants to onset their travel and crowdfund to support a local organization doing energy retrofits in low-income homes.
