Toward Carbon-Neutral, Equitable Conferences

Following up on one aspect of Maha’s post yesterday on “fostering permeability in academia”, I wanted to point to “A Nearly Carbon-Neutral Conference Model: White Paper/Practical Guide,” published by the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The White Paper lays out the environmental and accessibility costs of conferences. The authors compare the impact of flying participants in and of streaming video, they evaluate the financial feasibility of coming to conferences by global participants. In general, flying contributes an astonishing amount to a college’s carbon footprint–depending on how one does the calculation, 30-35% of UCSB’s total carbon footprint is attributable to flying.  For a conference, the contrast is even more stark:

In 2014, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) considered just how much energy is required to stream video to viewers. Including the streaming source, transmission pathway, access network, and equipment for playback and viewing, it is 7.9 megajoules (MJ) of energy per hour. In the process, 0.4 kg of CO2 is emitted per hour. An average conference panel talk is approximately 15 minutes. Consequently, everything else being equal, each time such a talk is viewed 0.1 kg of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Let’s assume that the above estimate of 63 views per talk is conservative (esp as people may continue to visit the website and view the talks after the conference is over) and increase it by 50% to round it off to 95 views, which would translate into 9.5 kg or 21 lbs of total CO2 for each panel talk.

Now let’s consider what the carbon footprint would be for speaker flying to a conference, using the May 2016 UCSB event as an example. Since we know where each of the speakers would have needed to travel from to get to Santa Barbara, we were able to calculate that collectively they would have needed to fly just over 300,000 miles to get to and from our campus. Divide that by roughly 50 speakers and you have about 6,000 miles each. That’s a lot, the equivalent of a round-trip flight from Los Angeles to New York. But keep in mind that this was a truly international conference with speakers from Canada, England, Europe, and a contingent from Australia (round-trip from Sydney to Santa Barbara is a whopping 16,000 miles). In any event, a round-trip, 6,000-mile flight releases roughly the equivalent of 2,000 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The model that EHI proposes involves, in effect, streaming video, with online discussion in the form of social media or shared, collaboratively editable documents. While they recognize that this involves some decrease in the human interaction that is the best part of conferences, they note that in fact the videos from their conference were viewed at least as much as many conference talks, and there was demonstrably more post-talk interaction in this format.

For such a conference to work, participants need to be able to record and upload video, and there needs to be a content management system to keep track of everything. The EHI explains how to do all of this with WordPress and a suite of free or low-cost tools, many of which are available on a smartphone.

A benefit of this approach is that participating in such a conference becomes much more feasible for scholars from around the world, which, as Maha discussed yesterday, is imperative.

UCSB is beautiful, of course, and as I get ready to hunker down for a New England winter it’s a shame to contemplate not-going to California, but there are a lot of excellent ideas in the white paper and practical guide, and it’s definitely worth contemplating in full.

What steps have you taken toward carbon neutrality in organizing conferences? Please share in comments!

Photo “Empty UCSB” by Flickr user Rafał Próchniak / Creative Commons licensed BY-SA-2.0