Estimating, monitoring and minimizing the travel footprint associated with the development of the Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit

Global warming imposes us to reflect on the way we carry research, embarking on the obligation to minimize the environmental impact of our research programs, with the reduction of our travel footprint being one of the easiest actions to implement, thanks to the advance of digital technology. The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU), the cryogenic spectrometer of the Athena space X-ray observatory of the European Space Agency will be developed by a large international consortium, currently involving 240 members, split over 13 countries, 11 in Europe, Japan and the United States. The travel footprint associated with the development of the X-IFU is to be minimized. For that purpose, a travel footprint calculator has been developed and released to the X-IFU consortium members. The calculator uses seven different emission factors and methods leading to estimates that differ by up to a factor of 5 for the same flying distance. These differences illustrate the lack of standards and regulations for computing the footprint of flight travels and are explained primarily, though partly, by different accounting of non- CO2 effects. When accounting for non-CO2 effects, the flight emission is estimated as a multiple of the direct CO2 emission from burning fuel, expressed in CO2-equivalent (CO2eq), with a multiplication factor ranging from 2 to 3. Considering or ignoring this multiplication factor is key when comparing alternative modes of transportation to flying. The calculator enables us to compute the travel footprint of a large set of travels and can help identify a meeting place that minimizes the overall travel footprint for a large set of possible city hosts, e.g. cities with large airports. The calculator also includes the option for a minimum distance above which flying is considered the most suitable transport option; below that chosen distance, the emission of train journeys are considered. To demonstrate its full capabilities, the calculator is first run on one of the largest scientific meetings; the fall meeting of the American Geoscience Union (AGU) gathering some 24000 participants and the four meetings of the lead authors of the working group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) preparing its sixth assessment report. In both examples, the calculator is used to compute the location of the meetings that would minimize the travel footprint. Then, the travel footprint of a representative set of X-IFU related meetings is estimated to be 500 tons of CO2eq per year (to place this number in perspective, it is equivalent to 2 billion kilometers driven by an average passenger vehicle). Of this amount, each annual consortium meeting accounts for 100 tons, being located at a site of minimum emission and for a minimum distance for flying of 700 km. Actions to reduce the X-IFU travel footprint are being implemented, e.g., the number of large consortium meetings has been reduced to one per year and face-to-face working meetings are progressively replaced by video conferences. As the on-line travel footprint calculator may be used to all scientific collaborations and meetings, the calculator and its methodology described in this paper are made freely available to the science communitycommunity ( https://travel-footprintcalculator.irap.omp.eu ).