Short communicationCarbon footprint of science: More than flying
Introduction
The environmental impact of frequent traveling by scientists has been recurrently criticized. For those occupied with ecology, environment and climate change the irony of the traveling behavior is often emphasized (Burke, 2010, Reay, 2003, Fox et al., 2009). Because individual mobility is highlighted as a significant contributor to climate change (Althaus, 2012) and the major part of the environmental impact of conferences is due to travel of participants (Bossdorf et al., 2010), flying to meetings to protect the environment sounds paradoxical indeed (Gremillet, 2008).
Conference attendance is only one of the activities that researchers perform. Office use and experiments require inputs such has heating, electricity, infrastructure and equipment which may trigger significant environmental impacts as well (Parsons, 2009). In fact, universities tend to take action to reduce their environmental impacts. Realizing the competitive advantage of carbon management they focus on their infrastructure to achieve campus-based emission reduction (Mascarelli, 2009).
In this short note we aim to present the carbon footprint of a complete science making process of one specific case, including experiments, desktop work and travel for field work, meetings and conferences, rather than limiting the discussion to the infrastructure and conference attendance of the researchers. Such impact assessment of a science-making process could (i) indicate what the total impact of scientific achievements is, (ii) evaluate the relative contribution of the different scientific activities, and (iii) identify and quantify mitigating possibilities.
Section snippets
Objective
As a case we quantify the total life cycle carbon footprint of the scientific activities (desktop work, fieldwork, meetings, and conferences) leading to a specific scientist's contribution: a PhD thesis. We evaluate the absolute and relative impact on climate change of the scientist's mobility, and the different reasons, as part of these activities.
Despite uncertainties regarding the potential greenhouse gas (GHG) emission savings of teleconferencing (Kitou and Horvath, 2008, Baliga et al., 2009
Materials and methods
The life-cycle assessment (LCA) procedure was used to evaluate the climate change impacts (carbon footprint in t CO2-eq emissions) of all inputs involved in the production of the PhD thesis. The footprint was calculated according to the official ISO guidelines (ISO, 2006).
As a specific scientist's contribution case we chose a complete PhD project in Environmental Sciences at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. Being clearly delimited in time and related to the work of mainly one
Results and discussion
The case PhD project had a carbon footprint of 21.5 t CO2-eq (2.69 t CO2-eq per peer-reviewed paper, 0.3 t CO2-eq per citation and 5.4 t CO2-eq per h-index unit at graduation) (Fig. 1). The annual emission of 5.4 t CO2-eq by the work of this Belgian PhD candidate represents 32% of the total annual footprint of an average Belgian citizen (Hertwich and Peters, 2009).
74% of the climate change impact (15.9 t CO2-eq) is caused by mobility (mainly air travel, 95%). Office, internet and computer use
Conclusion
The case study shows that frequent traveling triggers a considerable impact. Conference attendance is responsible for 35% of the carbon footprint, whereas infrastructure related emissions showed to contribute 20% of the total impact. Further it is shown that videoconferencing could indeed significantly reduce the emissions. Other mitigation initiatives such as using green electricity, reduction of energy consumption and promoting commuting by bicycle, could trigger, for this case, an additional
Acknowledgments
WA was funded through the KU Leuven Research Fund. JA is funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal. The comments and suggestions of three anonymous reviewers are greatly acknowledged.
References (20)
- et al.
Climate-neutral ecology conferences: just do it!
Trends Ecol. Evol.
(2010) Carbon footprints and embodied carbon at multiple scales
Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain.
(2010)- et al.
Sustainability in development cooperation: preliminary findings on the carbon footprint of development aid organizations
Sustainable Dev.
(2012) Modern individual mobility
Int. J. Life Cycle Assess.
(2012)- et al.
Carbon footprint of the internet
Telecommun. J. Australia
(2009) Travel trade-offs for scientists
Science
(2010)Cisco
(2009)- et al.
Leading the charge to virtual meetings
Science
(2011) Office Buildings: How Do They Use Electricity?
(2001)- et al.
Why do we fly? Ecologists’ sins of emission
Front. Ecol. Environ.
(2009)
Cited by (0)
- 1
These authors contributed equally.