(Clockwise from left) Jody Buggie, Fred Casarramona and Michel Gauthier have incorporated their carbon-neutral policy into the Rideau Canal Festival's brand and sponsorship model. (Photo by Darren Brown, OBJ)

The first Rideau Canal Festival is scheduled for this August, incorporating the Rideau Canal Flotilla and Colonel By Day festivities. But veteran Ottawa festival organizer Michel Gauthier is poised to pioneer another first in the nation's capital, when he hosts what's believed to become Ottawa's first carbon-neutral festival.

Working with a Toronto non-profit, Gauthier explained the festival will calculate all carbon generated from the event and purchase offset credits to fund the reforestation of an indigenous forest in Vancouver. Despite the additional cost, Mr. Gauthier and the Rideau Canal Festival's director of business development, Fred Casarramona, explain that going carbon-neutral makes good business sense.

OBJ: Where did the idea of a carbon-neutral festival come from?

GAUTHIER: We have a lot of festivals that have gone to the green festival approach, in terms of recycling, reusing, reducing. But I wanted to go further. I wanted to see what kind of leadership could be offered by this new festival and to push the envelope a bit. The other reality that really motivated me is that, if we are celebrating a UNESCO world heritage site, the whole concept of the UNESCO site is that we want to protect these sites for future generations. We're talking about safeguarding an environment. I'm thinking, if we are going to celebrate this, we need to be as green as possible. We need to be aligned with the whole concept of UNESCO.

We are a tourism product, so we have people coming from all over to our city to take part. And those people travelling are putting out gas emissions and we are putting out carbon dioxide when we plan and execute the festival. My thinking was, "How do we neutralize that?"

So looking for a model, I realized there were no models out there. Then I shopped around, I met with corporations that are in the offsetting part of environment and I came across Zerofootprint, a non-profit out of Toronto. What they do is they design calculators to help corporations or individuals to figure out how much carbon dioxide we are putting out there.

We have to do a footprint assessment in order to see what kind of gas emissions we've created. That's a whole model in itself right there. We can put all of that together and that will be the legacy of the Rideau Canal Festival leadership. Our objective is to share this with all Canadian festivals and, ideally, share it with all UNESCO world heritage sites around the world so that when they think about celebrating their site, they start thinking green.

OBJ: What will the effect be on your bottom line?

GAUTHIER: It's probably not a very profitable thing. It doesn't automatically bring positives to the bottom line. In fact, it brings a negative, it's another expense to the festival. We will need to have expenses to put this model in place and execute this model and monitor it and develop it as a model that is comprehensive as a legacy. There will be expenses surrounding that. The biggest expense will be the offsetting. If we generate 10,000 tons and we have to purchase those carbon credits, we're going to have to pay for that and that will add to our expenses.

Our challenge is, how do we make that a positive thing? How do we get the corporations that buy into the festivals buying into our zero-footprint initiative? How do we get our partners to buy into it and how do we get the public to buy into it? And that is what we've spent some time doing so that in the end not only is it a plus to the bottom line – we hope to turn that negative into a plus – but we want a 'plus' in the attitude of our partner corporations, our partner groups and our visitors to the festivals.

OBJ: What are the 'pluses' you envision down the road?

CASARRAMONA: We're actively seeking partnerships with like-minded organizations. Now we've developed a partnership-sponsorship model (with) a criterion. First of all, it says 10 per cent of sponsorship cash fees are going towards the Rideau Canal carbon credit trust fund. We're going to be establishing a carbon credit trust fund, and hopefully that carbon credit trust fund will go a long way towards us purchasing the required offsets to make the festival carbon-neutral.

We also get individuals and corporations that provide in-kind services. We're going to take the same approach. Five per cent will be required, in cash, from the corporations that provide in-kind services to go towards the Rideau Canal carbon credit trust fund.

No doubt, we are adding to the bottom line, but we think that we can do it and we are getting the support and a lot of interest right now from the private sector in this initiative.

OBJ: What is the typical reaction from a business when you present the model?

CASARRAMONA: It's fascinating. It's never been done before. Everybody is (thinking) green right now. They are just looking for opportunities to capture the environmental market.

GAUTHIER: We're going to recognize them (as) sponsors of this activity or one of the kilometres (of the canal). Our strategy around sponsorship is we want corporations to adopt a kilometre of the Rideau Canal and, basically, their sponsorship fee will give them their name on a kilometre. What we're also going to do is recognize them as contributors to the offset initiative. That's another source of visibility for them, and it acknowledges what they are doing for us and for the community.

OBJ: Can companies be both sincere about their environmental intentions and make a good business decision to join this carbon-neutral project?

CASARRAMONA: That is our critical success factor and that is our value proposition. There is no doubt that people and organizations want to get involved with good news stories. They want to be seen as innovators, and we believe that we've come up with a very innovative value proposition in delivering Canada's first carbon-neutral festival. I think it is going to work for all parties.

THE EXPERTS SAY

When we look at sustainability as a liability, what we are doing is looking at the downstream effects of unsustainability – we look at how much does it cost to clean up a lake, how much does it cost to change the kind of pollutants we put in the air. When we look at this as an upstream opportunity and we try to change the system that creates that pollution, we open doors to innovation that were previously closed.

Waste is essentially inefficiency. It means that we are not fully using the resources that we have purchased.

I heard a fantastic speech by the ex-president of VanCity, a credit union in B.C.: At first, they embraced sustainability because it was something that their employees wanted. Their number-one priority as an organization to survive in the future is to have the best-quality employees possible. He said the way that they will achieve that aim is by having a sustainability mandate because the best people want to do something they believe in. Their sustainability mandate was actually helping them to attract the best talent that was out there.

All this talk about sustainability, some people think that it's a buzzword and it is going to fizzle out after a while. But this is the quality revolution of the late 2000s. It is going to have the same, and so much more, impact on the entire way we do business. A lot of people ignore that to their own peril.

Anouk Bertner, communications manager, The Natural Step (Canada)

The great thing about going carbon-neutral is that you price in the externalities for the first time. What that does is create a level of awareness that we are using the environment and not paying for it.

You never want to offset in isolation. Offsetting is really the end of the system. First, you start with the measurement. Where do we stand now? How is this festival going to affect the environment?

After that, what you want to do is understand the best ways to reduce that footprint based on reduction and other means like recycling. If you want to take it to the next level, to the final stage because no matter what, there is still going to be carbon emitted, you can try to do something about it, which is offsetting and going carbon-neutral. Offsetting isn't a means to an end, it is really just part of the process and it is really something that should only be done in the interim. We should really be working toward longer-term solutions where we are investing the capital into more efficient systems and operations and that is happening too, but it can't happen quick enough, so offsetting is a great interim measure.

(Companies) benefit from the savings. If you are keeping the lights off, you are using less energy, if you decide to take one less trip across the country, that can be over $1,000 saved and it saves a lot of energy and time.

Deborah Kaplan, executive director, Zerofootprint