The Academy, recognizing the impact that its annual meeting and other meetings have on the climate, has been reducing waste and carbon emissions. For AAO 2023, the Academy worked with a vendor to create benchmarks for meeting waste and carbon emissions and to develop a plan to reduce both in the future.
Annual Meetings
Sustainability at Moscone Center
San Francisco, the site of the 2023 annual meeting, has been leading local climate action since 2004. The city has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 48%, and commercial buildings have reduced their greenhouse emissions by 71% since 1990. San Francisco's Moscone Center has the highest level of the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification, the largest rooftop solar panel array in San Francisco, zero waste stations for recycling and composting and the lowest carbon footprint of major convention centers in the U.S. Learn about nine ways Moscone Center is reducing conference waste.
Other convention centers where the Academy meets have similar initiatives to recycle and conserve, exemplifying how the meetings and convention sector is working to reduce carbon emissions. The airline industry has also been enhancing energy efficiency, using more sustainable fuel and developing alternative technologies, contributing a relatively small amount of overall CO2-emissions, and targeting net zero emissions for 2050.
California is also enacting leading measures to drastically cut pollution, have people into electric vehicles, hold big oil accountable, and protect communities from extreme weather.
View Sessions from AAO 2023
Access these sessions through AAO 2023 Virtual:
- The Academy is co-sponsoring a Symposium with the American University Professors of Ophthalmology at AAO 2023: “Green Ophthalmology, Our Sustainability Mandate” (SYM17).
- A course, Making Ophthalmology Sustainable: Reducing Your Overhead and OR Waste (Course 283).
- The Academy’s Young Ophthalmologist (YO) Program Part 3: Future of the Profession (SYM43) had a sustainability panel featuring David Chang, MD, MBA, Marybeth Farazdaghi, MD, and Danson V. Muttuvelu, MD, from Aalborg, Denmark.