Photo: 2025 Capstone Conference, Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy, UBC Medicine
Small actions can make a big difference.
In this Climate Story, we hear from Chanel Cai, a UBC Psychology Undergraduate Student and Student Engagement Assistant at Vantage College. In this role, Chanel co-created the Greening Your Small Conference toolkit for the 2025 Capstone Conference with Weaver Shaw, a Lecturer at Vantage College. This toolkit offers conference organizers practical, actionable steps they can take to host environmentally friendly events.
In the toolkit, Chanel documents the sustainable decisions she made while organizing the Capstone Conference to show that small actions can make a big difference. Chanel’s experience shows that everyone can make progress towards a greener footprint one step at a time, without striving for perfection at every turn.
Learn more about the inspiration behind the toolkit and Chanel’s advice for greening your event.
Can you tell us about your climate action?
For our climate action, Weaver Shaw and I worked on making the 2025 Capstone Conference more sustainable. We summarized our experience in a conference sustainability guide called The Green Toolkit. It supports small conference organizers in making their events more sustainable through small actions, without requiring extra funding.
The Green Toolkit includes suggestions for decisions that need to be made before, during, and after a conference, from venue selection and food choices to material selection, waste measurement, and recycling. We documented the small actions we took and celebrated each small success we achieved at the 2025 Capstone Conference, hoping these experiences could help organizers turn their sustainability ideas into reality.
For instance, at the Capstone Conference, we replaced single-use plastic name tags with reusable magnetic ones and increased the return rate from about 10 percent to 92 percent through clearer communication and volunteer support. We also designed multilingual sorting posters to support waste sorting, since the Capstone Conference celebrates the academic achievements of international students. As a result, waste sorting was nearly perfect at the conference.
“Overall, the Green Toolkit offers ideas and inspiration for organizers who want to improve the sustainability of their small conferences.”
Overall, the Green Toolkit offers ideas and inspiration for organizers who want to improve the sustainability of their small conferences. We are continuing to improve the toolkit and hope to create versions in more languages and make it more accessible. We also plan to add more content after testing new ideas at the 2026 Capstone Conference.
What motivated you to take this action?
Everything started when Weaver invited me to create this Green Toolkit for our conference. Like many people, I didn’t really have a clear idea of how to make a conference more sustainable. But throughout the planning process, I realized how many small actions we could take that could create long-term impact on sustainability. That realization made me want to share our experience, so more people can see how simple it is to integrate small green actions into larger environmental goals.
What advice would you give others who want to take similar steps?
My biggest takeaway from this experience is that we don’t need to make everything perfect at the beginning. Sustainability is about starting first and improving over time. At our conference, we didn’t meet all the goals we set. We planned to measure the waste produced at the conference, but the cleaning staff took our garbage before we could weigh it. We also planned to calculate the carbon footprint, but there were too many factors, and we didn’t manage to complete it either.
You don’t have to plan everything perfectly before you begin. Just open the Green Toolkit and pick one action from any page that you can do and start from there. You don’t need a perfect carbon footprint plan to start making a real impact on sustainability.
What resource (like a book, research paper, or documentary) do you recommend for learning about climate action?
I found the UBC Sustainability website is very helpful. They also have more advices and instructions on hosting a more sustainable event beside Green Toolkit, for example Green Your Events.
We want to hear your story!
The UBC Psychology Climate Stories series highlights members of our community who are taking thoughtful, collective action in response to climate change. Through short Q&As, members of the UBC Psychology community share the climate actions they’ve taken to adopt climate-positive behaviours. Every action—big or small—counts. Your story can inspire others to make a difference too.
Psychology Climate Action Committee
Our goal is to become the world’s first net-zero psychology department by 2030, advancing climate action in our department and beyond.
