Conference offsetting

🦴 I’ve got a bone to pick: why is it that the very industry aiming to scale carbon dioxide removal (#CDR) to achieve net-zero is flying people across the world to meet across continents for conferences without compensating for our own emissions?

✈️ A single medium-sized conference will generate 100 to 300 tonnes of CO2. The average participant produces 0.5 to 1.5 tonnes of CO2 per round trip. That’s a lot of emissions every year by hosting and attending dozens of conferences across the world in CDR alone.

☁️ Let me start by saying that offsetting is not the solution. We should be limiting our emissions in the first place: more centrally located conference venues, promoting more land-bound travel options, and enabling online participation for attendees from distant locations. In doing so, it can reduce the carbon footprint by 78-97%.

However, in-person conferences will continue for the foreseeable future, so the least we can do is to compensate for the emissions with durable CDR. I want to highlight two great examples:

1️⃣ Carbon Removal Basel, held in April by Carbonfuture, where all attendees provided information on their itinerary, and all associated emissions were compensated with durable biochar carbon removal (#BCR) credits.

2️⃣ Carbon Removal San Francisco, to be held in November by Carbon Removal Partners and Swissnex in San Francisco, where an estimate of emissions was calculated, sanity checked by a third party, and will be compensated with durable CDR credits.

🌍 If even we working in CDR (and climate more broadly) do not compensate for our conference emissions, how do we expect private companies and individuals to do so? Yes, it will make tickets and conferences more expensive, but there is simply no excuse for people working in our space to keep doing what we are doing. The planet is paying the price.

❓ So this is a call to action: if you are planning to organise a conference, go that extra step. If you are attending a conference, ask the organiser how they plan to compensate for emissions.

🙌 Let’s start to lead by example! Let me hear your thoughts and comments below.

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