Greening European Conferences? – Reflecting on Conferences’ Carbon Footprint and on the Location Optimisation Solution
Chloé Raïd is a PhD student in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on hosting exiled opposition, and how it affects the bilateral relations between home states and liberal democratic host states.
Over the past twenty years, scholarly interest in the carbon footprint of academic activities has increased exponentially. The particular case of academic conferences’ footprint has attracted growing attention from researchers of all disciplines. In fact, from early on, the scholarship has demonstrated that an overwhelming part of conferences’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions results from travel. While the scholarship has looked both at global-level and, to a lesser extent, regional-level conferences, it may be worth investigating the particular case of European conferences: not only has this region been mostly neglected by the literature on conference’s carbon footprint, but it can also be considered a special case due to its unique transport infrastructure, likely to affect the patterns of travel. In this blog, I examine how European conferences have fared in terms of carbon footprint by studying the case of a conference of the Jean Monnet network, RENPET 2022, which took place in Leiden. On this occasion, I remind the reader that a single long-distance return flight is often enough to exceed the emissions produced on average by a British or French citizen over an entire year. I then discuss location optimisation as a way to further mitigate regional conferences’ emissions, and propose ways to improve location optimisation methods. I then open the discussion persisting issues such as that of spatial inequalities, the controversial virtual option, and emphasise how academics’ habits and beliefs constitute a key factor in the difficulty we keep experiencing when seeking to mitigate conference’s carbon emissions.
Download the full text on RENPET Conferences’ Carbon Footprint