As we are talking about conferences – don’t forget to register for our summit if you haven’t already!
It’s all for free and a lot of sustainability to be found there.
Unfortunately, finding sustainability in other conferences is much harder.
Although, more and more organizers organize talks on green science, the huge footprints of in-person events is huge:
Today's Lesson: Footprints Of Conferences
Discovering the impact of scientific events
Number Of The Day
The annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union was estimated to leave a Carbon Footprint of about 80 Million kg CO2e! This is due to the 28000 delegates who traveled 285 million kilometers to get to their venue.
80 Million
The Impact Of Conferences
The carbon footprints of conferences are enormous - lets have a look at three examples:
Quantifying the Impact
For the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, with about 30,000 attendees, it was estimated that just due to travel, about 22 million kilograms of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) were released.
Travel related to the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting, with about 15,000 attendees, caused approximately 20 million kilograms of CO2e.
Interestingly enough, the American Geophysical Union meeting is not even the largest conference. Numbers refer to Carbon Dioxide equivalent emissions
And as we have heard, the Meeting of the American Geophysical Union with 28,000 delegates led to about 80 million kilograms of emissions due to 285 million kilometers traveled.
As you can see, the numbers are somewhat similar. As a publication from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy pointed out – it is about 15 tons of CO2e per researcher!
How Do We Arrive at These Numbers?
For most analyses, the home cities of participants are collected, and a carbon footprint is calculated based on the distance to the venue site. If the destinations are more than 400 km apart, it is assumed that an airplane was used for travel.
For instance, it was estimated that for the world’s largest Earth- and space-science conference taking place in the US, around 92% of participants traveled by plane!
In a survey for a conference in Lyon, 66.9% of respondents answered that they arrived by airplane, and 27.8% made use of a train.
This graphics comes from a publication on the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science 2019 held in Lyon, France. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1207-z
In fact, about 1 kg of carbon dioxide is emitted per passenger per 10 kilometers when traveling economy class. In other words, a flight from the east coast of the US to Europe and back produces as much emissions as a car during an entire year.
The Hidden Culprit - Long Flights
Most emissions are caused by a fraction of the participants.
One study found that 75% of emissions were caused by about a third of participants – those taking intercontinental flights.On the other hand, only 2% of emissions were caused by 22% of participants taking short-distance flights.
For the European Astronomical Society annual conference, more than 90% of emissions were due to intercontinental flights!
As shown in this graphic, traveling to conferences by car is still much less sustainable than using a train. Of course, take these data with a grain of salt but to my mind, they give a great overview. You can read more at the visualcapitalist Comparing the Carbon Footprint of Transportation Options
A Heads-Up
All those footprints focus on travel. Let us not forget that these are not the only footprints we leave when traveling. Give-aways, flyers, and air conditioning/heating at the venue have as well as staying in hotels leave a footprint too.
Applying The Knowledge
So What Can We Do?
Choosing a venue is more important than one thinks. Two studies compared estimated footprints based on various locations in the US. One of them concluded that emissions could be lowered or increased by 21% to 164%, respectively. The other found 12% savings and 42% increases.
It should be no surprise that hosting conferences biannually or switching to online conferences altogether is a great choice as shown by Burtscher and colleagues.
Regarding Ourselves
As a personal takeaway, conference attendance was estimated to make up about 35% of a PhD student's footprint (let us not talk about group leaders...). Therefore, let’s think twice about whether we need to attend conferences.
This is from a publication with data about the average Max Planck scientist (MPIA = Max Planck Institute for Astronomy). More than 80% of electricity consumption is estimated to stem from scientific computation. As information on these kinds of footprint is rare, I thought it might be of interest to provide it. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1202-4
PS: Trying to avoid having scientists flown around the world just to have them give a talk, especially for institute/lab meetings is my personal takeaway!
Upcoming Lesson:
How To Organize More Sustainable Meetings
Asking You
How much can the footprint of a conferences be reduced by switching to a virtual format?
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