Environmental Impact Committee

The aim of ESEB’s envir­on­ment­al impact com­mit­tee is to devel­op guidelines and recom­mend­a­tions for redu­cing the envir­on­ment­al impacts of ESEB activ­it­ies such as con­fer­ences and net­works. ESEB mem­bers inter­ested in join­ing the com­mit­tee are encour­aged to con­tact the ESEB Office at office@eseb.org. No pri­or exper­i­ence or spe­cif­ic expert­ise is required!

Actions for reducing ESEB’s environmental impact

Adop­ted by the ESEB Coun­cil on 15-12-2022

1. Congress format

Plane travel to and from ESEB events (con­gresses, net­work events, etc.) likely makes up >90% of the car­bon emis­sions of these events https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021–00823‑2. At the same time, face to face net­work­ing oppor­tun­it­ies remain import­ant, so plane travel is some­times unavoid­able due to the inter­na­tion­al nature of the soci­ety. There­fore, a strong aim of the Soci­ety towards a more cli­mate neut­ral future should be to reduce plane travel wherever pos­sible. To achieve this, the envir­on­ment­al impact com­mit­tee pro­poses the fol­low­ing measures:

  1. Record travel habits and sus­tain­ab­il­ity meas­ures of con­fer­ences organ­ised in a sys­tem­at­ic manner.
  2. Sup­port and encour­age mem­bers of the soci­ety to organ­ise online top­ic­al meet­ing in-between the reg­u­lar con­gress cycle.
  3. Explore and sup­port the imple­ment­a­tion of arran­ging a ‘hub con­fer­ence’ for the meet­ing fol­low­ing the one in Bar­celona. A hub con­fer­ence would include meet­ings arranged in mul­tiple loc­a­tion hubs to reduce long-dis­tance travel for the major­ity of mem­bers as they ideally attend one of the hubs without plane travel. If feas­ib­il­ity is estab­lished, from there­on that concept will be imple­men­ted as every second ESEB con­gress in the future.
  4. Live-stream­ing, includ­ing oppor­tun­ity to ask ques­tions online, and prefer­ably record­ing of sci­entif­ic ses­sions at all future ESEB con­gresses whenev­er fin­an­cially feas­ible. This also makes the con­gress access­ible to a broad­er range of evol­u­tion­ary bio­lo­gists https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021–00823‑2.
  5. Ensur­ing con­gress organ­isers provide par­ti­cipants with details about altern­at­ives to plane travel for future congresses.

2. Travel for other ESEB networks and initiatives

ESEB reim­burse travel costs for sev­er­al ini­ti­at­ives such as (but not lim­ited to) Spe­cial Top­ic Net­works (STNs), officers and invited speakers.

In the future, all such ini­ti­at­ives will not reim­burse the cost of plane travel when the dis­tance trav­elled is under 500 km, or the travel time with altern­at­ive trans­port formats would be less than six hours, unless there are excep­tion­al cir­cum­stances which is decided by the organ­izers of the meet­ing. Organ­izers should provide options of the green­est route.

3. Carbon footprint compensation

Cur­rently, there is no clearly optim­al approach for com­pens­at­ing car­bon foot­prints, but ESEB is com­mit­ted to con­tin­ued efforts to identi­fy appro­pri­ate com­pens­a­tion mech­an­isms, and util­iz­ing them when fin­an­cially feas­ible, once identified.

4. Other congress and network practices

Although plane travel makes up the major­ity of ESEB’s car­bon foot­print, there are a num­ber of oth­er actions that can fur­ther reduce emis­sions and res­ult in more envir­on­ment­ally friendly meet­ings. ESEB recog­nizes that imple­ment­ing these options may not always be the least expens­ive altern­at­ives, but sup­ports their imple­ment­a­tion des­pite this.

  1. Meals offered at con­gresses should primar­ily be plant-based.
  2. Use of dis­pos­able cups, plates etc. should be avoided, and if so they should be compostable.
  3. Drink­ing water refill points and recyc­ling sta­tions should be available.
  4. Any ‘extras’ provided with the con­gress bag, or offered by spon­sors, should be min­im­ized. Or even elim­in­ate con­fer­ence bags if possible.
  5. Con­gress ven­ues should have green certification.
  6. Addi­tion­al envir­on­ment­al actions imple­men­ted at pre­vi­ous con­gresses should be imple­men­ted wherever pos­sible (a list of pre­vi­ous actions is provided to each con­gress organiser).
  7. Con­gress organ­isers are expec­ted to report their planned envir­on­ment­al impact actions to the Envir­on­ment­al Impact com­mit­tee at least one year in advance of the congress.
  8. Oth­er ESEB ini­ti­at­ives (STNs etc.) are also expec­ted to fol­low these guidelines wherever pos­sible and to report their actions to the Envir­on­ment­al Impact committee.

5. Carbon neutrality

ESEB com­mits to aim­ing that its activ­it­ies are car­bon neut­ral by 2032.