1169180 - Mega-Event Greenhouse Gas Management

For more than a century, World Expositions have been a showcase for technological and social innovation. Because of the global nature and huge scale of these events, effective management of sustainability, carbon, and climate change are consistently identified as key success factors. Among many other innovations and advancements Expo 2020 Dubai (Expo) raised the bar on carbon accounting and management for global events.

In developing this greenhouse gas (GHG, aka carbon) inventory, staff from Expo and Jacobs conducted an analysis of the GHG reporting of past similar events including other World Expositions, Olympic competitions, and World Cup tournaments, and found wide disparities in methodologies, boundaries, processes, and quantitative results. These mega-events typically involve years of planning and construction, include hundreds of stakeholder organizations, require the transportation of millions of people and huge quantities of material, and are supported by major improvements to local transportation and utility infrastructure. Stakeholders expect that reported GHG emissions provide a comprehensive total of all sources, yet many past events have reported only a fraction of their emissions.

Corporate GHG accounting standards emphasize differentiation of direct versus indirect impacts and annual performance changes. Project GHG accounting standards are geared towards conservative reporting of emission reduction efforts. Value chain GHG accounting focuses on indirect GHG impacts of corporate operations. A key reason for the disparities in past accounting is the lack of clear guidance for multi-year, multi-stakeholder events.

This interesting and informative presentation will cover the results of the Expo GHG management program, including types of emission sources, the savings that resulted from the sustainable design and operations as compared to business-as-usual, and resulting quantitative estimates. It will detail how the Expo team adapted the existing accounting standards to develop its GHG inventory including the strategy for boundary setting, a lifecycle phase approach for emissions categorization in lieu of the typical GHG Scope 1, 2, and 3 categories, and the systematic shift from ex-ante to ex-post data as construction and hosting proceed. The Expo methodology is offered as guidance for future mega-events in support of more transparent, consistent, complete, and accurate GHG inventories and thus a stronger basis for mitigation of climate impacts.