Welcome to the scientific congress in the gorgeous city of Valencia. With around 200-250 attendees, the EARSeL Workshop on Imaging Spectroscopy is a medium-scale event, and its environmental impact is expected to be moderate. Nevertheless, we can try to minimize our footprint with regard to travel to and within Valencia, accommodation, catering, venue, information media, badges, signage, printed programs, welcome bags, and other items or activities related to this workshop. We are aiming to take ecological, economic, and social aspects into account in advance during the planning phase and give preference to catering companies as well as suppliers and event service providers who operate sustainably.
Minimizing Carbon Footprint at Our Scientific Congress!
We strongly encourage all attendees to help reduce the environmental impact of their participation by considering the following:
Sustainable Transportation
- Travel: We encourage participants to travel by train to Valencia whenever possible. Madrid main station is <2h train ride from the venue, within reach from Barcelona in < 3h, Sevilla < 5h, Bilbao <7h, and Lisboa in 10h.
- Public Transport: Valencia presents an exceptional public transportation network consisting of buses, metros, and trams that provide convenient and environmentally friendly travel alternatives.
- Cycling and walking are ideal transportation options to explore the city, given Valencia’s level terrain, and help reduce emissions.
- Car: If you can’t avoid travelling by car, consider offering a lift.
Catering
- Coffee and tea at the workshop will be served in reusable cups; however, we encourage participants to bring their own multi-use coffee mugs for their coffee(s) to go.
- To benefit from existing infrastructure, avoid resource-intensive transportation, and finally reduce participation fees, we will make use of local caterers for lunch and coffee breaks. All food served at the venue will include vegetarian options, be mostly seasonal, and, wherever possible, come from regional sources.
- We base our decisions for catering partners also on their efforts to reduce packaging waste to a minimum.
Workshop material
- To reduce paper waste, we provide most programs and resources through digital materials rather than print.
- Name badges will consist of 100% FSC or recycled paper, printed with water colours.
- There will be no welcome gift bags, sorry!
Waste minimisation
This can be achieved by using reusable materials. We strive to reduce single-use items and promote the use of reusable or recyclable materials throughout the event.
In order to reduce paper waste, we provide digital programs and resources instead of printed materials.
We are committed to energy conservation and use green energy sources whenever possible. Our venue places emphasis on utilising renewable energy sources to power the event, thus helping reduce our environmental impact.
In addition, we remain devoted to monitoring and managing energy consumption throughout the congress to promote efficient resource use.
Individual Commitments
Encourage participants to make personal commitments to lower their carbon footprints. Our aim is to encourage innovative scientific discussions while being aware of our environmental impact. Together, let’s take small steps towards sustainability to ensure a greener future.
We invite all attendees to embrace these principles and help us create a shared culture of environmental responsibility. Our goal is to make our scientific congress a shining example of environmental awareness.
Thank you for your cooperation in making our event eco-friendly and meaningful.
Feedback
We warmly welcome feedback and suggestions on how we can further improve and reduce the environmental impact of our events (secretariat@earsel.org).