Climate change
¹ EU Green Deal ² Ben Ari, personal communications
[left Image] IPCC WG 3 - Summary for policy makers [right image] (i) Labos 1point5 (Berné & Ben-Ari) and (ii) GES 1point5 (Mariette et al)
[background] by RCraig09 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80170965
at least +2°C
1.5°C Paris agreement
-55% by 2030¹
Society scale
Academia
Main sources of emission (France):
travels, commute, heating (+others)
During Covid:
\(-75\%\) travel, \(-50\%\) commute ²
There is urgency…
What is our agency?
International meetings
Emissions per attendee
EAS 2019 (Lyon): \(\sim 1,500\ \mathrm{kg.CO_{2,eq}}\)
EAS 2020 (Leiden, online): \(\sim0.33\ \mathrm{kg.CO_{2,eq}}\)
Total emissions EAS 2022 (estimated)¹:
\(+40\%\) since Lyon
“…transitioning from in-person to virtual conferencing can substantially reduce the carbon footprint by 94% and energy use by 90%”²
Plots: Courtesy of Burtscher L.
¹Burtscher, L., “The carbon footprint of large astronomy meetings”, Nature Astronomy, vol. 4, pp. 823–825, 2020.
²Tao, Y., Steckel, et al. Trend towards virtual and hybrid conferences may be an effective climate change mitigation strategy. Nat Commun (2021)
“Warming strips” by RCraig09 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80170965
(possible) Agency
- one meeting every two years?
- hybrid meetings?
- multi-site conference?
Talk point: how do we make EAS sustainable?