The Environmental Benefits of Live Streaming
A discussion into how to mitigate the environmental costs of events, by hosting them online.
Historically, people who work in certain industries have had to travel cross-country, cross-continent, or even all over the world, in order to keep up-to-date with developments in their industry and attend crucial industry training. This is because industry conferences tended to be held in one place, only available to view in-person despite being targeted at a worldwide community of professionals. This had a significant strain on the environment, which we have discussed separately, but to go into more detail about why this is the case:
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Travel to these international conferences is usually carried out via aviation, which produces a number of harmful emissions such as nitrogen oxides, particulates, contrails, and cirrus changes. These effects have been said to suggest that the aviation industry contributes to at least 5% of all global warming (according to Stefan Gössling, a professor at Sweden's Lund and Linnaeus universities and the co-editor of Climate Change and Aviation: Issues, Challenges and Solutions). This may seem like a small percentage, but considering the destructive threat that climate change poses, it is important to look at anything that contributes anything more than one per cent, to see how we can mitigate each and every factor one by one, focussing especially on something so unnecessary as pollutive travel that can easily be avoided. Furthermore, emissions from planes rapidly rise each year, partly due to an increase in passenger numbers.
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Even if your events are at a certain regional centre that people can drive to get to as opposed to flying, this still has a serious impact on the environment that should not be overlooked:
But how does live streaming benefit the environment in this way? The simple answer is that it makes all of that pollutive, unnecessary (and costly) travel unnecessary, as it enables audiences to still gather CPD points and keep up to date with the industry, by being free to view these events online. We have already seen how social distancing measures due to the Coronavirus crisis positively affected the environment - by hiring a team to be on call whenever you need further live streaming, these positive environmental measures could be a key strength of your business.
You might be worried about permanently introducing live streaming to your business post-Coronavirus, due to attendees not being as engaged in your events, or feeling disconnected. However, we have collated many reasons as to why live streaming, and on-demand videos, are an engaging part of a communications strategy that can seriously benefit your organisation. Furthermore, there is no reason why live streamed training courses and knowledge events have to be less effective at sharing knowledge - Employees can learn 5 times more material using online learning techniques than traditional online methods (Growth Engineering 2021). The same source found that the minimised travelling we have discussed accounts for 84% of motivations for employees choosing online learning over traditional learning and development in a classroom-based environment.
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If your organisation aims to reduce its carbon footprint even after the coronavirus, by allowing attendees to have the option to view the events online (either live via a high quality stream, or on-demand via a bespoke, fully edited video), contact CPDonline and we will be happy to support you with our high quality live streaming and video production services.
