Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Seeing Green in Conference Season

2009; Cell Press; Volume: 137; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cell.2009.06.003

1097-4172

Lila Guterman,

Climate Change Communication and Perception

Researchers and scientific organizations are becoming aware of the greenhouse-gas emissions and waste associated with attending scientific conferences. Fledgling efforts are now underway to address this problem by offering carbon offsets, recycling at conferences, reducing conference travel, or replacing meetings with teleconferences. Researchers and scientific organizations are becoming aware of the greenhouse-gas emissions and waste associated with attending scientific conferences. Fledgling efforts are now underway to address this problem by offering carbon offsets, recycling at conferences, reducing conference travel, or replacing meetings with teleconferences. In the scientific realm, as in society writ large, environmentalism is taking hold. As scientists begin to look for ways to make their day-to-day activities more environmentally benign, it has become clear that jetting around the globe to attend scientific conferences is environmentally costly. With conferences ranging from the huge annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in the US with more than 30,000 attendees to the much smaller Gordon Research Conferences with several hundred attendees, some scientists are urging their colleagues to assume more responsibility for reducing the carbon footprint associated with conference travel and attendance. Climate change, says Chris Hill, a biochemist at the University of Utah, "is a scientific challenge, and we should really make our actions match the scientific consensus." Efforts to make scientific conferences "green" have garnered a few enthusiastic converts, but most scientists remain unaware of such attempts and some are skeptical of them. Says microbiologist Samuel Kaplan at the University of Texas-Houston Medical School, "I have not given it one iota of thought ever." John Wallingford, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas, agrees: "I can understand why the carbon footprint might be a concern," he says. "But I'd be curious to know how it stacks up against that of, say, disposable pipette tips or the energy used by lasers on my confocal." One enthusiastic convert to the cause is Hill. He has made it a priority to counteract the carbon emissions associated with traveling to and attending the conferences he organizes. For example, at the Gordon Conference on Proteins that he chaired in 2007, he offered attendees the option to purchase carbon offsets—a way to invest in renewable energy, tree planting, or other activities that aim to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by an amount equal to that produced by attending the conference. Hill asked for $5 donations from each attendee at this conference to pay for a wind energy program run by the University of Utah. Not every attendee gave money, Hill says, but because some people gave more than the suggested amount, he was able to raise enough funds to offset the carbon emissions associated with his conference. "It can be very frustrating if you focus on the few people who don't get it," he says. "I just ignore them." Hill emphasizes that now he only attends conferences that attempt to be carbon neutral. He had hoped that the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology would introduce carbon offsets for its April 2009 meeting in New Orleans, but because of restrictions posed by being part of the larger Experimental Biology conference, the society was unable to do so. Hill still attended the conference. "The world isn't perfect," he says. "They tried. If you're trying to take a step forward, that's OK." Meanwhile, Rick Lindroth, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, also wanted to provide carbon offsets for the 2007 Gordon Conference that he was chairing on plant-herbivore interactions, held in Ventura, California. Working with the nonprofit organization Carbonfund.org, Lindroth estimated that the 5 day conference attended by 146 people would produce about 190 tons of CO2. The vast majority of greenhouse-gas emissions, nearly 160 tons, would come from air travel to and from the conference, with the rest associated with the conference venue, hotel accommodations, food service items, and ground transportation. Carbonfund.org offered to offset the carbon footprint of Lindroth's conference for around $7 per attendee. Lindroth circulated an envelope for donations each day of the conference, made announcements about the carbon offset program, and distributed a two-page primer. But he was disappointed with the results. "We came up a couple hundred dollars short," he says. "The co-chair and I pitched in and covered the rest of it." The attempts by Hill and Lindroth to offset the carbon footprint of scientific conferences are unusual. Nancy Ryan Gray, director of the Gordon Research Conferences, says that to date, no other conference chairs have approached the organization about offering carbon offsets to conference attendees. The conferences do not plan to offer carbon offsets as a general rule, Gray says. "The Gordon Research Conferences have a policy against political activities," she notes. "But we are open and maintain close contact with our chairs and the specific interests their communities have." She emphasizes that the organization itself attempts to be environmentally friendly: the headquarters building features solar panels on the roof, the conferences produce no paper reports, and the organization buses attendees from the airport to the meeting site to reduce car travel. A report in 2000 by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that, on average, an attendee at a 3 day meeting used 846 gallons of water (three times as much as the American average) and produced 61 pounds of solid waste (more than 10 times as much as usual). The same conference attendee might have used 21 cans or bottles and perhaps 40 cups and napkins. Enthusiastic individuals like Hill and Lindroth are often the drivers of action to cut waste or carbon emissions associated with conferences. In the absence of such fervor from members, scientific organizations tend to take smaller steps to address concerns about the environmental impact of their meetings. For example, the annual SfN meeting has implemented recycling and reduced printing needs by having most of the meeting information online. "Our leadership certainly recognizes that [the meeting] comes with environmental responsibility," says Mona Miller, SfN's senior director of communications. A few scientific conferences such as the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) are more aggressively pursuing an environmental agenda. Every ESA attendee's registration fee includes $5 for carbon offsets. The organization no longer prints handouts and brochures for attendees and does not give new tote bags every year. (For attendees who want a new bag, ESA provides bags made of recycled plastic.) For the printed program, ESA uses paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council to come from sustainably managed forests. The badge-holders are made from corn and the lanyards from recycled bottles. ESA also takes the environment into account when choosing locations for its annual meetings, selecting cities that have hotels close enough to the conference center that attendees can walk instead of taking a bus or taxi. And ESA works with conference centers and vendors to use biodegradable materials for cups and plates. "It does cost us extra," says Michelle Horton, ESA's meetings manager. But, she adds, "It's driven by our membership." This summer, the society will meet in Albuquerque, New Mexico. "We're trying to buy wind power to run the convention center while we're there," Horton says. Future meetings will take place only in cities with green initiatives, she adds. Despite these efforts, some scientists say that the best way to reduce the environmental impact of meetings is to skip traveling to them altogether and to attend remotely by teleconference or videoconference. "A lot of meetings are just scientific tourism," says Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University. He says that the corporate boards he sits on use videoconferencing to communicate. "It's highly interactive," he says. "It's time saving. It's travel saving." Other scientists argue that scientific meetings are too valuable to miss attending in person, given that tele- and videoconferencing facilities do not offer all of the benefits of face-to-face interactions. Kevin Moses, associate director for science and training at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus, says that through conferences "we wish to promote discussion and collaboration among scientists." Telecommunication is "very poor at allowing people to meet for the first time, and to cross barriers into new fields," he says. In-person meetings may be the only place to work out particularly sensitive or controversial topics, says Marcia McNutt, the president of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. People speak more openly in person and in private, she says, than when they are being recorded online or over the phone. David Liberles, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming, says, "What one gets from a videoconferenced presentation isn't that different from what one gets by reading a paper." But when scientists attend conferences in person, he says, "you find out that people are doing things you didn't know they were doing, or you meet people you'd never met before who are thinking about things related to what you are doing." Very little information exists about the impact or extent of green initiatives in the meetings industry. "We're in the new-adopter stage," comments Elizabeth Henderson, director of corporate social responsibility for the trade group Meeting Professionals International (MPI). Andrew Walker, an event specialist in Toronto who is working on a master's degree in environmental studies at York University, says, "There isn't a lot of research. There's a lot of anecdotal stuff." Collecting data on travel by scientists can be difficult to do, even within a single institution. Some universities have tried to estimate the carbon footprint of all of their activities and have posted their results online (http://www.aashe.org/resources/ghg_inventories.php). Many left out faculty travel because of difficulties with gathering data. At the University of Pennsylvania, the travel office booked 13,000 miles of flights in the last 6 months of 2006; assuming faculty members flew at that rate every year, their air travel would make up about 8% of the university's total greenhouse-gas emissions. Because not all faculty members book flights through the travel office, the fraction is likely to be higher. Utilities account for the vast majority, about 85%, of carbon emissions associated with the university, says Daniel Garofalo, U. Penn's environmental sustainability coordinator. The meetings industry needs standards to help event planners, suppliers, and venues get a handle on what they can do, and what is worth doing. Many environmental choices are not obvious: Is it less wasteful to make signs from recycled paper or to use electricity to light digital signs? In the US, several groups including the Convention Industry Council and the EPA are developing standards for hosting a greener meeting (http://wp.apexsolution.org). The standards tend to focus on categories including the destination, the meeting venue, accommodations, travel, and food services. Thus far, the draft standards include steps such as developing a written commitment to sustainability, implementing recycling, and choosing locations that require the shortest distances to be traveled by attendees. Information about green conferences appears online. MeetGreen, a consulting firm, has summarized trends in sustainable meetings (http://www.meetgreen.com/files/docs/MSWW_2009SustainableMeetingIndustry.pdf), and the trade group MPI has gathered links to websites about environmentally friendly meetings (http://www.mpiweb.org/Archive/196/82.aspx). Meanwhile, the Convention Industry Council's Green Meetings Report (http://www.conventionindustry.org/projects/green_meetings_report.pdf) outlines best practices for event organizers and suppliers. The current gold standard for certifying an event as green is the UK's British Standard 8901. This report (http://www.bsi-global.com/en/Standards-and-Publications/Industry-Sectors/Environment/more-products/BS-8901/) was prepared to help make the 2012 Olympic Games, to be held in London, a sustainable event. Unlike the American standards, which focus on logistics, British standards focus more on process, says MPI's Henderson. She notes that the British standards ask: "What are your sustainability objectives? How well do you engage your stakeholders in the process? And educate them? How do you measure what you've done? It's a process of sustainability." She adds, "What is built into the standard is each time you are certified you need to do better than you did last time." This year, many scientists are reluctantly reducing their travel—not because of the environment but because of the economy. Hill says that to save money, his department has decided to bring in half the usual number of seminar speakers and has asked the other half to give talks remotely. Many scientists doing interdisciplinary or inter-institution research are reducing the number of in-person meetings and are switching to teleconferences. So even though most scientists may not be thinking about the environmental impact of their conference travel, they may be reducing it anyway. And Hill, ever the optimist, looks forward to a day when travel itself may be environmentally less costly. "Sustainable air travel seems a long way in the future," he says, "but it's not forever in the future."