New Zealand Celsias

Like most weddings (though admittedly this isn’t a “most weddings scenario”), the big day of the nuptials has arrived very quickly and even the biggest royal scrooges, though they might not admit it, are getting a little excited, or in the very least, a little curious. But with all the hype surrounding the event, no one’s really stopped to think about its potential environmental impact, which is fine because no one really wants to be a party pooper. While it’s not an attempt to rain on the royal parade (because let’s be honest, not much could), Landcare Research’s carboNZero programme has done the numbers to work out a rough “fanciful estimate” of the emissions associated with the royal wedding, complete with suggestions on what the Royal Family should be doing to cut emissions (though none of them include the Queen planting trees). The research comes after the UK's The Daily Telegraph commissioned the numbers from carboNZero.

When you take into account things such as air and vehicle travel, accommodation, energy usage at venue receptions, catering, waste to landfill, national rail and underground travel and (deep breath) aviation fuel use, you come to the nice symmetrical number of 6, 767 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e). To put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of 12 times the annual emissions of Buckingham Palace, 1,230 times the annual emissions of the average UK household or the equivalent of emissions from 325 return economy trips between Auckland and Heathrow.

That number may seem high, but it’s got nothing on the 2010 Soccer World Cup which stomps all over the royal wedding, contributing to 2.7 million tonnes of CO2e, according to GMO journal. 

Of course estimating the true total carbon cost of the event feels like it could be a limitless task and carboNZero admit to excluding certain emission sources like the manufacturing of wedding merchandises and the air and vehicle freight of equipment. 

And of course there’s every likelihood that many a number of Brits won’t be travelling to work today, opting instead to stay put in their homes to watch the big day on TV. 

“The calculations have been undertaken as a fun exercise and should only be used in that context,” says carboNZero in its report. 

What we do know is happening wedding-side from a more sustainable point of view, under the gaze of Prince Charles who has a penchant for environmental matters (he has his own organic garden and runs his car on bio-ethanol), is that the canapés are being locally sourced, as are the ingredients for the organic wedding cake. The flowers are also expected to be locally sourced and all documents are being printed on recycled paper or FSC-certified paper. The scaffolding in the media stands is also made from FSC-certified wood.

Guests have been asked to donate to charity instead of buying wedding gifts, and suggested charities include the Adopt a Coral Reef programme and Earthwatch.

Now pass the bubbles.