This post is to relay some news from SIGACT, in which TCS4F member Tijn de Vos was involved.

Last year, Laurent Feuilloley and Tijn de Vos did some research in the environmental impact of conference travel. They were invited by Dan Alistarh to publish our findings in a column in SIGACT news, which is also available on Tijn's website. They compute what impact the location of a conference has on the total emissions and discuss several more environmentally friendly alternatives. Although their work focuses on the distributed computing community within computer science, we think it's worth a read for any academic.

To comply with the Paris Agreement, each person has roughly a CO2 budget of 1.5 tons/year. For the distributed computing community, you can see in the image below the average CO2 emissions per participant when traveling to a conference, for various locations around the world. As even the minimum is exceeding the 1.5 tons budget, it is evident that we need a more structural change.