Ecological Footprint Committee (formerlly Carbon Offset Committee)

• Introduction
• Committee Members
• Carbon Offset Website
• Terms of Reference

Introduction

Climate scientists unanimously agree that human activities, especially emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, are altering the earth’s climate in ways that will profoundly affect our lives. Over 95% of SCB’s contribution to global warming derives from jet fuel burned to take people to our annual meeting. Each passenger on a fully-booked London-New York flight, for instance, is responsible for about 1.2 tons of carbon.

At the June Board of Governors meeting in San Jose, California, USA, the decision was made to take responsibility for the carbon impacts of travel to our Annual Meetings. By becoming ‘carbon neutral,’ we will neutralize the effect of our greenhouse gas emissions, so that our activities no longer contribute to global warming.

The first Annual Meeting (travel) to be offset is the 2007 Meeting in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. A small fee was added to each attendee’s registration fee to offset the carbon of the overall travel to the meeting.

Further information will soon be available about the success of this effort and future plans for offsetting the carbon output of SCB.

Committee Members

Environmental Footprint Committee (EFC) - Terms of Reference
November 2008

Goal: The goal of this committee is to move SCB to fully offset all its GHG emissions (not just the annual meeting) and to reduce the environmental footprint of all SCB operations, purchases, and activities. The EFC will work with the Board of Governors (BOG), Executive Office (EO), Sections, Conference Committee, and Local Organizing Committee.

Activities: To achieve its goals, the committee will:

1. Work with the EO to estimate SCB’s greenhouse gas emissions, amount of waste generated, and amount of energy and resources consumed by SCB activities, including SCB global meetings, Section meetings, Chapter activities, EO travel, office operations, and publications.
2. Recommend actions to reduce such impacts and to offset impacts that cannot practicably be reduced.  
3. Seek BoG authorization for actions that would require significant investment or loss of income.
4. Produce an Annual Report on SCB’s impacts and progress in reducing those impacts. This information will be posted on our website, presented to the BOG, and reported in the SCB Newsletter.
5. Educate SCB members and other professional societies to take responsibility for their GHG emissions and other impacts. From a global perspective, SCB’s footprint is trivially small. But we can have a big impact by sharing our lessons, developing and distributing the first fully transparent office footprint calculator, leading by example, and promoting education on these issues.
6. Provide Sections, Working Groups, and Chapters with information and opportunities to act in concert with the EO (e.g., pooling our offset dollars).

Relation to Strategic Plan: The EFC supports several elements of the SCB strategic plan, most directly Goal 5 (impact and reputation). Some tension may arise with Goal 6 (organizational capacity), because some actions to reduce our ecological footprint may take staff time and resources from other SCB activities. 

Committee Membership The committee will include at least 12 members, including:
Chair, appointed by the President
Representatives from at least two Sections
Representative(s) from the Conference Committee
Representative(s) from the current Local Organizing Committee
SCB Executive Director or EO manager or both
SCB Meetings Coordinator (if any)
At least three volunteers from SCB membership, preferably with experience or knowledge of offset markets, life-cycle analysis, and related fields

Ad-hoc status: Per SCB by-laws, the committee started as an ad-hoc committee in July 2008, with the understanding that it may become a standing committee in July 2010.