Climate-neutral ecology conferences: just do it!

Conferences are important. They allow researchers to learn about the latest research, to present and defend their own work, and, most importantly, they provide ample opportunities for networking. However, scientific conferences have come under attack for their climate impact, in particular for the CO2 emissions caused by air travel [1]. The situation is particularly ironic for climate researchers and ecologists who speak out against CO2 emissions and yet have a considerably larger than average carbon footprint [2–4]. As a result, more scientists are demanding that the number of scientific meetings be drastically reduced [1,4–5], or that meetings should become partly or entirely virtual [6]. We agree that excessive CO2 emissions caused by scientists are a serious issue, both in the impact of the emissions themselves and as a terrible signal to the public. Therefore, we advocate combining several measures to: (1) reduce the number of scientific conferences to only the essential ones, (2) organise conferences as environmentally-friendly as possible, and (3) compensate for the remaining CO2 emissions through investment into carbon offset projects that reduce emissions elsewhere, e.g. through implementation of renewable energy technologies. Recently we hosted a medium-sized three-day ecology conference (www.popbio2009.unibe.ch) with 125 participants from 14 countries. Tomake the conference ‘‘greener,’’ we chose local food for catering, avoided disposable tableware, and printed materials on environmentally-friendly paper. We inquired regarding each conference participant’s means of transportation and entered all conference details into the CO2 calculator for events provided by http://www.myclimate.org, which estimated the total emissions caused by our conference as 11.5 tons of CO2. Sixtysix percent of these emissions were due to travelling, whereas food and accommodation accounted for 18% and 13%, respectively, and the remaining 3% were due to printed material and waste. To bring the carbon balance of our meeting back to zero, we invested 280 s into carbon offset projects. In summary, with moderate effort and extra costs of only few s per participant, our meeting became climateneutral. Of course, a European conference such as ours may cause comparably low emissions because few participants travel by air. Still, even if emissions of conferences of intercontinental character are an order of magnitude larger, it remains surprisingly inexpensive to make them climate-neutral, and we suggest this should become common practice for ecology conferences worldwide. Despite some movement to make ecology conferences more environmentally-friendly (e.g. the recent ESA meetings),many conferences stillmake no such efforts. Even less