Green Strategies at Coral Reef Conference

image credit: http://www.nova.edu/ncri/11icrs

This past week I attended the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale. I was co-chairing a session on climate change and coral calcification. Besides being a great meeting, with over 3000 attendees, it was organized as a "Green" meeting. The steps that the conference took to go green were quite commendable.

1) The conference worked with Carbonfund to calculate how much carbon would be produced and then offsetting a portion of that carbon using some of the registration fees.
2) They distributed aluminum water bottles with the registration materials to reduce the number of disposable water cups used.
3) All printed materials were on recycled paper; meeting T-shirts were made of organic cotton; and meeting badges were made from eucalyptus material.
4) The food was generally produced locally and remaining food was given to the local food pantry.
5) Attendees had the option to forgo receiving the large abstract booklet and instead were encourage to view the abstracts online. This option alone can save 100's of thousands of pages of paper.

Given the dire situation of coral reefs as a result of climate change, it is only appropriate that the conference would choose to go green. Hopefully, green meetings become the norm as corporations and organization become more environmentally conscious.

For more information about the meeting visit the International Coral Reef Symposium Website.