Using sustainability as a design principal creates better and more innovative meetings! This is the conclusion among executives from Oracle, Symantec, MCI and GMIC – among others – presented in a brand new video.
“The future is changing, we are progressively seeing more organisations gaining competitive advantage by using sustainability as a lens through which they can design better meetings and drive innovation. Denmark proves this, and the GMIC is helping to enable the knowledge sharing and collaboration required to take this to scale,” said Michael Luehrs, President of Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC), and present at the European Sustainable Event Conference.
The conference was the first of its kind and designed to foster innovation in meetings industry. Michael Luehrs was just one among a number of visionaries from across the industry gathered in Copenhagen this September, who illustrated how meetings of the future will be driven by collaboration, sustainable meeting design, innovation and hybrid technologies.
Guy Bigwood, MCI Group Sustainability Director was also present. He comments:
“2012 will be remembered as the year that the meeting and event industry reached the tipping point. Planners never before have such a choice of sustainable services and this year saw the release of the most sophisticated standards, guides and certification for our sector”.
European Sustainable Event Conference
The conference was executed by the Danish Sustainable Events Initiative (consortium responsible for the sustainable execution of the Danish European Union Presidency) in a close collaboration with the Green Meeting Industry Council (GMIC).
The conference was held at the Bella Center in Copenhagen that has a proven record hosting sustainable events – this year hosting the first ever event to be certified to ISO 20121 for the European Presidency together with the city of Horsens in the western part of Denmark. This follows their groundbreaking success in 2009 as the host of the first ever sustainable event certified to BS 8901, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) hosting over 30,000 people for nine days.
Steen Jakobsen, Convention Director of Wonderful Copenhagen Convention Bureau explains:
“Today, Denmark and Copenhagen are recognized internationally as being among the top destinations when it comes to hosting meetings and conventions in accordance with sustainable principles. Therefore it was a natural step for the partners of the Danish Sustainable Events Initiative to initiate this new conference.”
Copenhagen’s leading position is illustrated by hard facts with 64% of the hotel rooms in Copenhagen are ECO-certified, 55% of the Copenhageners commute by bike on a daily basis and the City of Copenhagen is executing an ambitious environmental plan in order to become the first ever carbon neutral capital in 2025.
