Andrea Gokus, Knud Jahnke, Paul M Woods, Vanessa A Moss, Volker Ossenkopf-Okada, Elena Sacchi, Adam R H Stevens, Leonard Burtscher, Cenk Kayhan, Hannah Dalgleish, Victoria Grinberg, Travis A Rector, Jan Rybizki, Jacob White
Travel to academic conferences-where international flights are the norm-is responsible for a sizeable fraction of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with academic work. In order to provide a benchmark for comparison with other fields, as well as for future reduction strategies and assessments, we estimate the CO2 -equivalent emissions for conference travel in the field of astronomy for the prepandemic year 2019. The GHG emission of the international astronomical community's 362 conferences and schools in 2019 amounted to 42,500 tCO2 e, assuming a radiative-forcing index factor of 1...
May 2024: PNAS Nexus