Sustainability

A key aspect of social marketing is sustainability which is why the UK Social Marketing Conference aims to have as little negative social, environmental and economical impact as possible. We aim to achieve this by:

  • Minimising the use of paper, energy and natural resources at the conference
  • Ensuring our event partners have a transparent and sustainable environmental policy
  • Setting delegate, exhibition and sponsorship fees at realistic and affordable levels
  • Ensuring all produce served is local and seasonal
  • Engaging with the local community to minimise the events environmental impact and maximise the social, educational and economic benefits for local people from all backgrounds
  • Working closely with the conference venue to set a strict environmental policy

Where the event impact can’t be reduced, we aim to sustainably offset the carbon footprint of the conference by teaming up with Citola and encouraging delegates, exhibitors and sponsors to contribute to the Sofala Community Carbon Project (details below).

Offsetting can be carried out by individuals booking on the registration form, or by using the carbon calculator tool below.

Sofala Community Project – Mozambique

An innovative sustainable-development project working with forest communities in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park, Sofala Province, Mozambique.

The project design is to implement forestry and agroforestry activities that enhance sustainable livelihoods, rehabilitate severely degraded forest environments, promote biodiversity and sequester carbon (generate Verified Emission Reductions - CERS).

The projects work with a large number of rural smallholders (i.e. farmers or producers) and promote the adoption of sustainable land use management to plant and maintain trees amongst their crops and around their homesteads. It involves reforesting degraded forest and altering land use patterns in mashambas (areas of land ‘slashed and burned’ for crop planting and left in fallow due to soil degradation) with indigenous Miombo woodland trees, primarily local fruit and bee-fodder species, fruit trees and other selected species along watersheds to help stabilise the riverbanks.

The individual smallholders can choose to adopt mitigation activities from a menu of different land use systems (seven agroforestry and one forestry system). For each of these systems, technical specifications have been elaborated, which summarize all relevant information (i.e. establishment, management, site requirements, carbon sequestration potential, etc.).

 

with the support of:
www.brighton.ac.uk
Emerald CIM