Posted by Matt on Wednesday, September 22, 2010.

Event carbon calculation added to middleware toolkit

For years we’ve been doing custom carbon emissions inventories for meetings and events ranging from conventions and conferences to music festivals and sporting events. Now we’ve released a new meetings module of our carbon middleware service that lets software developers build event carbon calculation into their own applications.

The meetings and events emitter, accessed through our API, lets users specify a range of characteristics to calculate emissions from venue energy use. Used in combination with other carbon middleware emitters like transport, hotel stays, food, and fuel purchases, an event inventory can be expanded to cover the desired emissions scope.

Underpinning this event carbon model are authoritative data from the EIA’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey and the EPA’s eGRID, imported automatically to our system on a daily basis to ensure currency.

We’re excited to see website and software developers put the tools to use. We’ve got applications in mind ranging from widgets that let wedding and party planners estimate their impact, to platforms that enable corporations to manage all aspects of convention and summit carbon footprints. But IT engineers will no doubt surprise us with innovative ways to integrate this carbon data into their systems.

Events and meetings can be great opportunities not only to meet your organizations’ own sustainability goals, but also to promote conservation by helping to enlist participants and attendees in the emissions calculation and reduction process. In working with event organizers we’ve had great success using a four-pronged approach that addresses event carbon inventorying, emissions reduction initiatives, mitigation through offsetting, and attendee participation in measuring, reducing, and offsetting their own event travel emissions.

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