What are the Intermediate Environmental Impacts?

• Proportion of total attendees driving to/from the event by car
• Proportion spectators/competitors using dedicated park & ride facilities
• Number of spectators using public transport
• Total miles travelled to event by spectators and competitors
• Attendees who believed the event worked to promote sustainability objectives
• Attendees who believed event efficiently managed waste streams and adopted means of reducing attendee carbon footprint
• Proportions of attendees asserting that event attendance will impact upon their environmental behaviours
• Total CO2 emissions per event attendee
• Total energy consumption per event/attendee

Overview & Considerations

Intermediate-level environmental impacts tend to focus around measurement of people's activities and perceptions around an event. If an event has tried hard to promote environmental best practice then it could be valuable to measure the impact this has had on spectators and attendees - firstly in terms of whether this has been noticed, and secondly around whether people intend to change their own environmental behaviour as a result.

In terms of people's environmental activity around an event, it is relatively straight-forward to put in place tools which provide good benchmarks for organisers to measure year-on-year, for example total miles traveled by car/public transport. For certain events, organisers or funders may want to go one step further and translate people's responses into more formal measures of CO2 emissions.

Routes to Measurement

Primarily these impacts will be secured through survey work. In the case of developing specific measures around areas such as carbon or waste, it will typically be necessary to use a specialist contractor who will be able to design appropriate survey tools, and who will be skilled in converting those responses into formal measures.