Environmental impacts of mega-events play a significant role in the overall attitude of different stakeholder groups. Thus, a comprehensive strategy on mitigating negative environmental impacts has become an important feature of a planning process. Mega-event planning is a complex multi-staged process, thus, common universal guidelines can significantly simplify the implementation of sustainability measures throughout the whole project life cycle. The most widely applied sustainability and environmental event guidelines and standards are:
62 The Olympic Movement Agenda 21. It was inspired by the UNCED Agenda 21 and adapted to the characteristics of the Olympic and sports movements. It suggests to the governing bodies and individuals the areas in which sustainable development could be integrated into their policies. The emphasis is placed on sustainable resource and waste management, environmental protection education and training, respect of the different social, economic, geographical, climatic, cultural and religious contexts which are the characteristics of the diversity of the members of the Olympic Movement (IOC, 1999).
IOC Guide on Sport, Environment, and Sustainable Development. It provides event organisers, sports authorities, competitors and the public with detailed environmental guidelines on organising sporting events in regards to the different sports types (winter or summer, indoors and outdoors) (IOC, 2006).
ISO 14001-14006 Environmental Management Systems. The standards that cover the design and implementation of an environmental management systems (EMS). It is a framework which was designed to assist organisations with measuring and improving the use of natural resources and reducing emissions from waste disposal. It is a generic standard which is applicable to any organisation. The benefits of using ISO 14001 can include reduced cost of waste management, savings in energy and materials use, lower distribution costs and improve corporate image among regulators, customers and public (ISO, 2014a).
ISO 26000 Social Responsibility. This standard provides guidance to all types of organisations on the concepts, terms, characteristics, core subjects and issues of social responsibility (SR) and on practices and principles relating to SR. It is intended to assist organisations in contributing to sustainable development and encourage them to consider societal, environmental, legal, cultural, political and organisational diversity. It is not a management system standard and, thus, it is not appropriate for certification
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purposes or regulatory or contractual use. It does not contain any requirements; it provides guidance concerning SR and can be used as a part of public policy activities (ISO, 2014b).
BS 8901 Specification for a Sustainability Management System for
Events. This standard was developed by British Standards Institute. It
provides a set of guidelines to help with the planning and management of sustainable events. The requirements of BS 8901 were developed for events of all types and sizes. The standard can be applied throughout the entire supply chain. By applying this standard, event organisers can improve their sustainability within budget, reduce carbon emissions and waste and implement appropriate safety measures (BSI, 2014).
ISO 20121 Event sustainability management systems. Based on the earlier BSI 8901 standard, this management system standard has been designed to help organisations in the events industry to improve the sustainability of their event related activities, products and services. It applies to all types of sizes of organisations involved in the event industry. The standard applies to the management system operated by the organisation that is compliant with ISO20121, not the event. It does not specify which sustainability issues to manage or what performance levels to achieve (ISO, 2012).
GRI G3 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. Developed by the Global Reporting Initiative, the document provides recommendations on sustainability reporting of all types of organisations. The first part provides guidance and principles for defining report content, quality and boundary setting. The second part specifies the base content that should appear in a sustainability report in terms of strategy and profile, management approach and performance indicators. It also provides a technical protocol on applying the report content principles (GRI, 2011).
The above standards and guidelines have been internationally adopted as the main standards and are being widely used during the planning of mega-events. The
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investigation of the main standards showed that although they can provide some essential guidelines when developing a sustainability management strategy and reporting the progress, they do not specify any quantitative targets or define a set of tools that should be used in order to measure the company’s performance.
A similar conclusion was drawn after analysing a number of toolkits that were developed based on the above standards for specific mega-events. One of them is the ‘Sustainable Sport and Event Toolkit’ (SSET, 2008) developed by the Vancouver Organising Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. This toolkit was designed to help with developing a sustainability strategy for the 2010 Winter Olympics and other similar major events. This toolkit provides event organisers with a set of goals in different sections such as transportation, catering, site selection and construction, supply chain, athlete and public engagement. This is a qualitative framework which describes the objectives and provides a recommended list of actions. Some quantitative performance indicators are suggested, however, the toolkit does not provide any suggestions on specific numerical targets and evaluation techniques.
Although the standards provide some useful recommendations for the event organisers, sustainability management strategies of different mega-events vary considerably. The main reasons are the common concentration of the organisers on local issues of the host cities, a complexity of trade-offs between sustainability aspects, and a mixture of qualitative and quantitative performance indicators. It is argued that currently there is no a common standard or a uniform system that could be applied for a holistic quantitative assessment and comparison of the sustainability impacts of mega-events (Collins et al., 2009).
3.3.2. Quantitative assessment of the environmental impacts of mega-