A neuroscientist from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, with a colleague from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, authored an essay calling for scientists to do what they can to reduce their carbon footprint while engaging in professional activities, such as fly less often to distant professional society meetings, urge those societies to meet less often, and make greater use of electronic communication to web conference. A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide released from using fossil fuels by a person or group of people.

Peter Sterling, PhD, a professor of Neuroscience at Penn, and Jeremy Nathans, a professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, at Hopkins, published their piece this week in Elife.

Sterling and Nathans write that, “anthropogenic climate change is the single greatest challenge facing our planet and our species. What was once ‘an inconvenient truth’ has become an imminent global emergency that will lead to rising seas, the extinction of species and, very likely, large-scale social instability.” Their basic idea is to dramatically reduce long-distance air travel for scientific collaboration.

To demonstrate the impact of researchers’ carbon emissions from flights, they analyzed the cities of origin of the 30,000 attendees at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, DC. They estimated the mean round-trip distance traveled per person to be about 7,500 kilometers. This came out to a carbon footprint of 22,000 metric tons, about the same as the annual carbon footprint of 1000 medium-sized laboratories.

They propose a few steps to reduce the carbon footprint of the scientific community:

• All large scientific societies with an annual meeting cut back to one large meeting every two years.
• Seminars, grant review panels, interviews, and other travel-intensive activities be examined with an eye toward reducing long-distance travel
• Activities that do not require a face-to-face meeting should consider emote video-conferencing or conference calling to accomplish the same outcomes.