A global meet on gender equality hosted by The Gender Park earlier this year achieved carbon neutrality and became the first carbon neutral event of the State government.
The Gender Park, under the Women and Child Development Department, organised the second edition of the International Conference on Gender Equality (ICGE II) from February 11 to 13 in association with UN Women.
With sustainability as its core theme, the meet held on The Gender Park’s new campus in Kozhikode followed PAS 2060 and ISO 14064 carbon neutrality standards that set out requirements for conducting and demonstrating carbon neutrality.
The Gender Park achieved carbon neutrality by taking on board Vydyuthi Energy Services (VES), an energy and carbon consulting start-up recognised by UN Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEP). The VES provided an overall framework for validating and preparing the calculations, and documentation of the entire event’s direct and indirect emission sources. An independent third-party verification agency issued the carbon neutrality statement for the event.
The total greenhouse gas emissions were 50 tonnes of CO2e for the entire event, including the emissions related to organising and on-site assessments performed for the award. The organisation had offset these emissions through purchase of 50 units of United Nations Certified Emission Reduction (CERs) generated from a waste-to-energy project in Delhi listed under UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Clean Development Mechanism.
