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When a majority draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court was leaked in May, hinting that Roe vs. Wade would be overturned in the summer, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) decided to pull their annual Clinical and Scientific Meeting out of New Orleans.
Many organizations, and especially associations, are challenged by legislation and policies that are counter to the values of their members, such as "bathroom bills" and statewide measures outlawing abortion. The firm opposition to these laws leads some to consider canceling their meetings in the destinations in which the laws were passed.
From airmiles and gas-guzzling shuttle buses to lake-sized quantities of plastic bottled water and piles of brochures, events can exact a heavy toll. Pre-COVID, the annual carbon footprint for the global event and convention industry was on par with the yearly greenhouse gas emissions of the United States, according to a study by Cornell University and researchers from the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment published in Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27251-2 last month.