Climate v Academic Careers
Last week my producer Ally Pelphrey and I attended the Balticon science fiction and fantasy convention over Memorial Day weekend and then I flew to Orlando to meet with a colleague, spend a couple days at Disney, and help a friend move.
This kind of travel is a bit selfish — I get to hug old friends, take a selfie with a the Gay street sign in Baltimore, and do things that can only be done face to face, like lifting heavy boxes to load a van. I’m doing this because I want to.
But in general, academia requires me to travel if I want to maintain my career. The 3 years of the pandemic demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt real-world conferences and events are necessary for healthy collaboration and inspiring new directions in research. They can’t be replaced with virtual events — the networking just isn’t the same and the doors opened are fewer if they are there at all…. And who among us has succeeded at virtually attending a meeting in Japan while living at home a dozen time zones away?
When researchers who care about our climate see this, they start doing research.
In a new paper in the Journal of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, researchers lead by Marie-Elodie Perga review the carbon footprint of researchers attending conferences between 2004 and 2023. Based on the distribution of conference venues and information on where attendees are based, they determined that a typical conference attendee produced 1.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide while traveling to and attending each conference. As a point of comparison, the Paris Agreement has a stated goal of 2.3 tonnes of carbon emission per year per person by 2030 and 1.4 tonnes by 2040. This means attending just one conference a year will create more than half a year's worth of emissions.
When a major theme of so many conferences has become climate and its impacts on everything from weather to oceans to farming to manufacturing, it becomes clear that our current ways of communicating with one another and advancing our careers need to become our old ways.
Many conferences suggest going vegan or using electric vehicles as possible ways to make conferences greener, and before you all @ me about that possibility, their research finds that what we eat and how we drive are only minor factors compared to the associated damage done by air travel.
And with so many conferences held in places like Hawaii, and so many conferences requiring jumping from one continent to another, rail travel isn’t exactly a reasonable alternative.
But there could be another way.
The pandemic taught us that humans are terrible at mingling in virtual spaces and even more terrible at fully engaging in virtual events. We know from the research that conferences that require a 1000 people from around the world to converge on one spot are terrible for the environment.
But what if instead, there were simultaneous satellite events, such that people in different regions gathered for the same event at the same time, with the understanding that keynotes would be beamed between locations, and parallel sessions would have real-world speakers scattered from place to place? The logistics are suddenly super complex, but that’s something we know how to do. Now… we have shortened travel distances for everyone, real-world interactions for everyone, and the chance to have a shared semi-virtual semi-IRL meeting with a globe-spanning population of researchers.
I attended one conference like this in the days before the pandemic. It was hosted by the American Humanist Society and was split across many university campuses to allow more people to participate with a lowered carbon footprint. This isn’t a new idea. It is just one that requires our professional societies to rethink their business models… and if it comes down to climate or the economy… I know which side I’m on.
