The operations community is at the right stage and position to contribute to the debate on the environmental footprint of global activities. To this end, we would like to engage our community in a debate on the environmental and societal footprint of our conferences through a panel discussion. Using data collected from a number of recent professional OM society (namely Informs, POMS and EurOMA) conferences, this panel discussion will begin by illustrating the drivers of variations across environmental footprints (Life-Cycle-Assessment to be precise) of different conferences. We’ll then proceed with presenting the results of a recent survey we ran on how different conference format choices (e.g., online versus in-person) affect not only the environmental footprints but also the social and scientific value added our conferences provide the societies with. We’ll conclude with a panel discussion on how best to interpret these findings, which will hopefully help shape the future of our societal conferences.