Assessing the carbon footprint of a large international research program: study case of the BRIDGES kick-off meeting

There is a rising concern in the academic community about the environmental impact of research activities. Carbon footprints are typically evaluated at the laboratory or institutional level, but there are lacking an evaluations at the level where research is actually performed, i.e. at the level of research projects. In this work, we focus on the french BRIDGES international research program as a study case. We evaluate the carbon footprint of its kick-off meeting held in 2024 in the island of La Réunion, a French oversea territory located in the Indian Ocean. We report that the organization of the meeting emitted 100±37 t CO2eq. for 112 participants, mainly dominated by air travels. We then discussed that organizing this meeting in Paris would have emitted 2.5 times more greenhouse gas than in La Réunion. We discuss mitigation strategy for future meetings, including an optimized venue, where the location of the meeting is defined only after the participants are known, to minimize the carbon footprint of air travels. We also evaluate the carbon footprint of combining travels with other scientific objectives, by extending the duration of the accommodation and compared it with the one of doing a second air travel.