Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A society moves its annual meeting from a single global venue to three regional hubs joined by video, reducing travel emissions.
- Is an instance
A learned society publishes the per-delegate kg CO2e of its 2024 meeting in the conference report.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A purely virtual webinar has near-zero travel emissions and is out of scope.
- Not an instance
Local seminars within walking distance contribute negligibly.
Editorial commentary
Conference travel is frequently the single largest discretionary line in an individual researcher’s annual carbon footprint, and often the largest controllable category in a lab or department’s overall research carbon footprint, because long-haul flights to attend a meeting are avoidable in a way that, say, heating a lab building is not. Klower et al. (Nature, 2020) analysed the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting and estimated its 2019 edition (roughly 25,000 attendees) generated on the order of 80,000 tonnes CO2e from air travel alone — illustrating how a single large annual meeting can rival a mid-sized organisation’s total footprint.
How conferences are responding
Practice is shifting on several fronts: some societies now publish an event-level, and in some cases per-delegate, carbon estimate in the post-meeting report, treating it as a transparency exercise similar to a financial report. Venue and format choices are the main levers — moving from one global venue to several linked regional hubs joined by video, reducing meeting frequency from annual to biennial, and structured hybrid formats with genuine remote presentation slots, rather than a passive livestream, instead of treating virtual attendance as an afterthought. The Royal Society’s 2021 Net Zero Climate work is among the bodies that have pushed learned societies to weigh carbon explicitly in venue selection.
What counts, and what doesn’t
The category specifically covers travel (flights, ground transport, and associated accommodation) tied to attendance at conferences, workshops and scholarly meetings — distinct from fieldwork travel or relocation, which are usually tracked separately in a full research carbon footprint. A purely online virtual conference has near-zero travel emissions and sits outside this category almost by definition; a local seminar within walking or transit distance contributes negligibly and is not usually tracked separately.
References
- Klower et al., “An analysis of ways to decarbonize conference travel after COVID-19,” Nature, 2020; Royal Society Net Zero Climate report, 2021.
Also known as
Conference flying · Meeting travel emissions
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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