Conference conundrum tackled

A Dunedin researcher has helped find a way to avoid the dilemma of academics flying to international conferences on global warming adding to the problem.

"I think it’s got to be taken really seriously," James Higham, of the University of Otago tourism department, said about the issue yesterday.

"It’s a problem we can’t really ignore."

"Travel is core to the business of the university — to be an internationally recognised university you need to be well connected internationally," he said.

Before the pandemic, climate researchers realised an uncomfortable truth: that the very meetings and events intended to help fight against climate change were causing vast greenhouse gas emissions through international air travel, Prof Higham said.

Researchers found all travel linked with attending one large academic conference could release as much CO2 as an entire city in a week.

And the 28,000 delegates attending the American Geophysical Union’s conference in San Francisco last December had travelled an estimated 285million kilometres — almost twice the distance between Earth and the Sun.

However, building on lessons from the pandemic, Prof Higham and Oxford University colleagues PhD student Milan Klower, Prof Myles Allen and Associate Prof Debbie Hopkins had identified new ways to cut the carbon footprint of conference travel by up to 90%.

The study is published this week in the journal Nature.

Lead author Mr Klower says the study’s proposed new model identified key areas for improvement, including carefully selecting venues to minimise transport emissions, and hosting conferences only every second year.

Hubs should also be created so people travelled shorter distances, but could still benefit from networking while linking virtually to other hubs, he said.

The study found that intercontinental flights accounted for a high proportion of total emissions — far more than regional flights.

This meant that promoting alternative forms of regional transport such as trains had only limited effect in reducing a conference’s overall footprint.

However, scientists based further away should not be excluded, and researchers from under-represented regions like the Global South, and New Zealand itself, should be included.