Heads in the clouds: On the carbon footprint of conference‐seeded publications in the advancement of knowledge

Seuront, Laurent; Nicastro, Katy R.; Zardi, Gerardo I.

doi:10.1002/ece3.8201

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 25 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They can be essential to forming impactful partnerships between the Global North and Global South. There are aslo quantifiable benefits to in-person meetings, such as the formation of collaborations that result in increased research productivity [ 9 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Quantifying the climate benefits of a virtual versus an in-person format for an international conference

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background Academic institutions across the globe routinely sponsor large conferences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many conferences have used all- or partially virtual formats. The conversion of the 2021 Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) conference, originally planned in-person for Houston, TX USA to an all-virtual format provided an opportunity to quantify the climate-related impacts of in-person versus virtual conferences. Methods From the 2021 CUGH conference registration data, we determined each registrant’s distance from Houston. Using widely available, open-source formulas, we calculated the carbon footprint of each registrant’s round-trip drive or flight had they traveled to Houston. We assumed that registrants traveling more than 300 miles would have flown, with the remainder traveling by automobile. Results Of 1909 registrants, 1447 would have traveled less than 4000 miles, and 389 would have traveled more than 10,000 miles round trip. Total travel-related carbon emissions were estimated at 2436 metric tons of CO2, equivalent to the conservation of 2994 acres of forest for a year. Conclusions Organizations can now readily quantify the climate cost of annual conferences. CUGH’s annual international conference, when held in-person, contributes significantly to carbon emissions. With its focus on promoting global health equity, CUGH may play a lead role in understanding the pros and cons for planetary health of in-person versus virtual conferences. CUGH and other organizations could routinely measure and publish the climate costs of their annual conferences.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most of these studies have focused on the carbon costs of air travel. Other scholars, especially in the environmental sciences, have gone a step further by weighing academic objectives against travel-related carbon emissions, recognizing the need to balance knowledge building and research collaboration against carbon costs [ 8 , 9 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying the climate benefits of a virtual versus an in-person format for an international conference

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A path forward to more sustainable and inclusive meetings Ideally, the reduction of GHG emissions from travel to scientific meetings is conducted such that the quality of research is not impacted. Meetings are beneficial for collaboration and travel to in-person meetings has been found to increase visibility (Berné et al, 2022), however, it has only a limited effect on success (Wynes et al, 2019), and it can also reduce an individual's productivity (Seuront et al, 2021). A straightforward way of cutting emissions therefore could just be reducing the number of meetings, e.g., organising recurring annual meetings only every other year.…”

Section: Environment and Equitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Astronomy’s climate emissions: Global travel to scientific meetings in 2019

Gokus,

Jahnke,

Woods

et al. 2024

PNAS Nexus

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Travel to academic conferences—where international flights are the norm—is responsible for a sizeable fraction of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with academic work. In order to provide a benchmark for comparison with other fields, as well as for future reduction strategies and assessments, we estimate the CO2-equivalent emissions for conference travel in the field of astronomy for the prepandemic year 2019. The GHG emission of the international astronomical community’s 362 conferences and schools in 2019 amounted to 42,500 tCO2e, assuming a radiative-forcing index factor of 1.95 for air travel. This equates to an average of 1.0 ± 0.6 tCO2e per participant per meeting. The total travel distance adds up to roughly 1.5 Astronomical Units, that is, 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. We present scenarios for the reduction of this value, for instance with virtual conferencing or hub models, while still prioritizing the benefits conferences bring to the scientific community.

show abstract

“…In fact, an inverse ratio applied, whereby the least productive biologists and oceanographers actually exhibited the largest carbon footprints. This leads Seuront et al (2021) to propose that a two-fold decrease in the average carbon footprints of the scientists studied would lead to a two-fold increase in productivity. From a similarly clear-eyed perspective, we can note some of the very real advantages of virtual meetings.…”

Section: Climate Champions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon neutral conferencing: A case study in poetics

Magee

2023

Text

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The author was co-convener of the Australian Capital Territory’s first government-certified, carbon-neutral conference, Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry and the World, 5–7 December 2022. This paper centres upon a case study of that conference, intended to serve as a model for future such events. Bookending that case study are two discussions. The first addresses recent scholarship on the internationalisation of the university sector and the conflict it poses to concurrent policy drives towards environmentally sustainable operations. The literature on sustainable conferencing reveals the extent of that conflict, but also contains many practical measures for staging responsible events that involve genuine emissions reductions. Some of those measures feature within the poetry conference case study: vegetarian catering, eradication of printed materials, free registration for Indigenous delegates, compulsory travel offsetting, deliberate regionalisation. A final section considers problems with the very idea of carbon neutrality – as a concept based in “net” accounting practices that equate measures intended to affect the removal of emissions with no emissions – in the interest of driving further change in our conferencing practices.

show abstract

Heads in the clouds: On the carbon footprint of conference‐seeded publications in the advancement of knowledge

Cited by 8 publications

References 25 publications

Quantifying the climate benefits of a virtual versus an in-person format for an international conference

Quantifying the climate benefits of a virtual versus an in-person format for an international conference

Astronomy’s climate emissions: Global travel to scientific meetings in 2019

Carbon neutral conferencing: A case study in poetics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About