Responsible academia: optimizing conference locations to minimize greenhouse gas emissions

900 members and has hosted multi-day conferences biennially since 2007 with approximately 200 to 400 guests (2007 in Canary Islands, Spain; 2009 in Merida, Mexico; 2011 in Crete, Greece; and 2013 in Miami, USA). While relatively-small, the meetings are extremely international (e.g. the meeting in Miami, Florida USA [hosted by KJF] had 409 attendees from 40 countries). Using meeting registration data obtained directly from the IBS, we estimated the air travel distances and GHG emissions associated with the travel of attendees to each of the society’s four previous meetings. To estimate travel distances, we georeferenced the centroid of each attendee’s home country, or in large countries with many attendees the home city of the associated attendee’s institution. The roundtrip air travel distance of each attendee was estimated as 2 the shortest-possible great-circle-distance to the meeting location. Using guidelines set by the USA’s Environmental Protection Agency (US Environmental Protection Agency 2008), we then estimated the average CO2-equivalent GHG emissions per attendee and the total emissions associated with each meeting. We compared each meeting’s estimated GHG emissions to the emissions associated with the same attendee pool traveling to random meeting locations (potential meeting locations were restricted to the home countries/cities of past IBS meeting attendees) and that year’s optimal meeting location. Optimal meeting locations were identified for each year as the site with the lowest total GHG emissions (see Supplementary material Appendix 1 for additional information). Across all years, the average round-trip air travel distance per attendee of the IBS meetings was 9564.1 km. The average GHG emissions per attendee ranged from 2.5–3.0 tonnes CO2, with an overall average of 857.1 tonnes CO2 emitted per meeting. The average travel distances to the actual meeting locations was always significantly shorter than random, equating to an average saving of 3402.8 km of air travel per attendee and 324.1 tonnes CO2 per meeting. If meetings had been held at their optimal locations, there would have been an additional average savings of 1866.6km of round-trip air travel per attendee and 162.3 Ecography 38: 402–404, 2015 doi: 10.1111/ecog.01366 © 2014 The Authors. Ecography © 2014 Nordic Society Oikos Subject Editor: Miguel Araújo. Editor-in-Chief: Miguel Araújo. Accepted 21 October 2014