MAP and the ISO 20121 certification

ISO 20121 is a management system standard that has been designed to help organisations in the events industry improve the sustainability of their event related activities, products and services. The purpose of the Standard is to provide a framework on how to implement a management system to manage sustainable development issues taking into account social, economic and environmental factors. Successful implementation of an event sustainability management system will ensure continual performance improvement and management of issues rather than an ad-hoc approach.

In addition to ensuring a favourable environment for the organization of sustainable and paperless meetings, the main goal of the MAP Sustainable Task Force is that MAP and its RACs obtain the ISO 20121 certificate. To that end, a workshop with the MAP ISO consultant was organized end October 2016, in Athens, Greece, which was attended by the MAP and RACs TF members. The event sustainability management systems were discussed in order to further enhance the sustainability of MAP operations including ISO20121 as a practical tool for managing events aiming at contributing to the three dimensions of sustainability, i.e economic, environmental and social. The workshop participants agreed on a workplan to implement key activities towards improved event management. More details about the MAP and its RACs way towards the ISO certification, as well as the timeline, are available here.