Dubai: Farnek offsets carbon footprint of 14th CEBC Annual Summit

Farnek, a facilities management company based in the UAE, said in a statement dated Oct. 30 that emissions generated by the Clean Energy Business Council’s (CEBC) 14th Annual Summit in Dubai have been fully offset.

A total of 131 delegates took part in the gathering, hosted at the DIFC Conference Centre. Together they produced 7.46 tonnes CO2e, or roughly 57kg CO2e each. To cancel this out, Farnek retired eight Gold Standard carbon credits, each worth one tonne of CO2e.

Those credits go to community projects abroad: clean cookstoves for refugees and other vulnerable groups, boreholes, and access to water that is safe to drink.

Farnek served as the summit’s Carbon Neutrality Partner. Its own initiative, the Emirates Carbon platform, recorded attendee and operational data digitally and worked out emissions in real time at the venue. Seven areas fed into the calculation: power use, food service, materials, waste, logistics, delegates’ travel and hotel stays.

Work started before the doors opened, the company said. It set the scope of the assessment, projected emissions and pulled figures from the organiser, the venue and suppliers. No single-use plastics were used during the summit, the menu included sustainable choices, and delegates got tips at registration on shrinking their personal footprints.

“Every event has a footprint,” said Muna Al Nahdi, Farnek’s Director of Sustainability & Consultancy. In her view, what counts is precise measurement, cutting what can be cut and owning the remainder. Since the UAE hosts hundreds of conferences and exhibitions annually, she argued, doing this systematically could genuinely help the country reach its Net Zero goals.

Al Nahdi also sat on a panel at the summit titled “Closing the Loop: Circularity as a Sovereign Industrial Strategy”.

For coming CEBC editions, the 57kg per-attendee figure becomes the reference point against which emissions will be tracked and pushed lower.