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How to Create:

Sustainable Meetings & Events

At Harvard, our goal is to cultivate a culture of health and sustainability in how we plan campus meetings and events, providing opportunities for staff, students, faculty, and visitors to eat well, stay active, and reduce waste while advancing the University’s sustainability goals. By implementing best sustainability practices into everyday meetings and events, we take an important step to support the inclusive well-being of our community and others globally, both now and in the future. 

Sustainable Meeting and Event Guide:

In the full Sustainable Meeting and Event Guide, which was developed by a team of students and staff from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Office for Sustainability, you will find resources such as:

To supplement the Meeting and Event Guide, the Harvard Office for Sustainability has assembled a Showcase of Ideas and Options for Sustainable and Healthful Catering at Harvard. Though not an exhaustive list, this guide is intended to inspire and educate Harvard catering purchasers and event organizers to select sustainable meal options.

Highlights from the Sustainable Meeting & Event Guide:

Photo of a variety of plant-based foods.
  1. Showcase plant-based proteins (like beans, lentils, or tofu) paired with vibrant flavors, ideally as the default main dish.
  2. Offer drinks without single-serve packaging, such as fruit-infused pitchers of tap or filtered water
  3. Ask caterers to label common allergens, such as nuts, dairy, sesame, and shellfish.
  4. Serve whole grains instead of refined grains (for example, brown rice instead of white rice), and ask caterers to cook with healthful oils like canola or extra virgin olive oil.
  5. When offering snacks, feature nutritious plant-based items like fresh fruit, hummus with crisp vegetables, and nuts.
  6. Coffee and tea (with plant-based milk as an option) after a meal can leave guests satisfied. For a special treat, consider dark chocolate-covered fruit or bite-sized vegan baked goods.
  7. Whenever possible, choose reusable items. When single-use items are necessary, ask your caterer to use clearly-marked compostable or recyclable serving items.
  8. Make sure your meeting room has a “waste station” with identifiable compost, recycling, and trash bins.
  9. Periodically break up sitting time with standing, walking, or light stretching. Ensure there are options for all abilities.
  10. When appropriate, collect RSVPs to help determine how much food to order. For very large events, pre-arrange food donations with your caterer.

Why Make Meals Greener By Default?

Animal products, especially red meat and dairy, generally have higher environmental impacts compared to plant-based foods.

The mission of the “Greener by Default” is simple: Offer plant-based food as the main meal, but let attendees optionally add animal products when they RSVP. For buffet events, serve at least twice as many delicious plant-based dishes compared to meat dishes.

Institutions that have adopted Greener By Default as a formal food policy report significant overall reductions in their consumption of animal products, without restricting diners’ options.


Sustainable Meetings & Events

By following the tips in this guide, you can create more sustainable meetings, conferences, and events that prioritize the wellbeing of people and the planet.

Download Harvard’s Sustainable Meeting & Event GuideOpens new window

Cover page of Harvard's Sustainable Meeting and Event Guide. Photo shows students getting food at a buffet.

Showcase of Ideas & Options for:

Sustainable & Healthful Catering at Harvard

This guide highlights some creative and delicious offerings from on-campus vendors that align with Harvard’s Sustainable Meeting & Event Guide.

 

This showcase is intended to inspire and educate Harvard catering purchasers and event organizers, but it is not an exhaustive list. We encourage you to peruse our vendors’ menus for their full offerings.

Download the 2023 Sustainable & Healthful Catering Showcase

Cover page of Harvard's Showcase of Sustainable and Healthful Catering Menu.
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Healthful and Sustainable Food

Harvard pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food by 25% by 2030 as part of Coolfood Pledge.

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Sustainability Resources

Explore sustainability resources at Harvard.

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EXPLORE & ENGAGE IN SUSTAINABILITY

Upcoming Events

April

17

Thursday
12:30 pm-2:00 pm GMT+0000

Ximena Caminos, “The ReefLine”

The cultural place-maker Ximena Caminos presents “marine acupuncture,” an innovative practice combining high art and deep science to target critical pressure points within our oceans and fostering environmental awareness through art and action-driven conservation. The ReefLine will be a 7-mile underwater public sculpture park, snorkel trail, and hybrid reef off Miami Beach’s shoreline. Conceived by Ximena Caminos and developed by the BlueLab Preservation Society, the ReefLine nonprofit team collaborates with the architecture firm OMA, as well as marine biologists, researchers, architects, and coastal engineers to design the master plan. Caminos’ lecture, followed by a conversation with Pedro Alonzo and Charles Waldheim, highlights how this pioneering approach uses human ingenuity to ignite ecological processes that regenerate the reef.

April

11

Friday
12:30 pm-4:30 pm GMT+0000

Climate Connect: Community-Driven Solutions to Heat-Based Inequity

The symposium will be a one-day event held at Pound Hall (tentative) at HLS, accommodating approximately 50 attendees. The event will feature six to seven invited speakers who are experts in environmental justice and heat exposure, a poster session, and a networking session. This event is open to public. The primary purpose of this symposium is to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange in addressing environmental injustice in a world with increasing heat exposure. This symposium is highly multidisciplinary and welcome members from academia, law, policy, and community organizations.

April

08

Tuesday
12:30 pm-1:30 pm GMT+0000

Ensuring the Right to Food in the Face of Climate Change: The Role of UN FAO

Join the Harvard Human Rights Journal and the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic for a talk by Dr. Daniel Gustafson, Special Representative of the Director-General at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), former Deputy Director-General of the Organization, on “Ensuring the Right to Food in the Face of Climate Change: The Role of UN FAO.”

The talk addresses the interrelations between climate change and global hunger from the perspective of the UN FAO, highlighting how climate change exacerbates food insecurity and hinders the full realization of the right to food, while also examining how food systems contribute to climate change and why their transformation seems essential for both food security and climate mitigation. Dr. Gustafson will provide insights on the UN FAO’s role and current activities, recent challenges and initiatives by countries related to climate change and the right to food. He has over 40 years of international experience working on approaches linking science and policy for food security, sustainable agricultural transformation and capacity development, having been the UN FAO’s Country Representative in Kenya, Somalia, India and Bhutan. Moderated by Professor Emily Broad Leib.

April

08

Tuesday
12:00 pm-1:30 pm GMT+0000

Against Cryo Nullius: Icy Materialities and Nunatsiavummiut Refusal of the Settler State

Join the Weatherhead Center Canada Program for their Canada Seminar featuring Emma Gilheany, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Canada Program, and Affiliate, Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP).

Abstract: In this talk, I explore an analytic I have developed called cryo nullius—where icy scapes are perceived by settlers as spectacular, vast, and un-peopled. This perception allows for the conditions of infrastructural violence to manifest in the circumpolar north. I focus in particular on Cold War-era US Air Force radar bases that spanned the circumpolar north as well as present-day Inuit environmental practices to avoid toxicity that has seeped into the land and water from these ruins of technological excess. I argue that Nunatsiavummiut reject this colonial perception of and violence on their sovereign land through the specific materiality of the sub-Arctic. This work is a highly collaborative multi-modal anthropology that engages evidence including archaeological survey, ethnographic research, Inuit oral histories, and archives produced by Inuit governments, missionaries, and the USAF. This project foregrounds Nunatsiavummiut future-making to critique erasures of Indigenous politics and specific environmental harms in discourses of the climate crisis and Anthropocene.