The last 12 months have seen most physical conferences go virtual due to restrictions in gathering and traveling. Speaking personally, the virtual event format has become incredibly tedious in a world in which all social interactions occur through the medium of a screen. One would at least assume that the carbon footprint of virtual events is much lower than their physical brethren, however.
New research from the University of Michigan set out to explore whether this was really the case. The study finds that while virtual conferences do significantly reduce the carbon footprint of events, they come with environmental costs of their own.
Analyzing carbon emissions
The researchers developed a framework that tallies the carbon emissions produced by an online conference. The framework includes factors such as the energy use of the servers to the manufacturing of the computers involved.
The researchers also showcase the framework via the virtual conference held by the AirMiners in May 2020. The conference produced 66 times less than a similarly sized in-person gathering would have. There are things that online organizers can do to reduce the emissions of their events even further, however.
Greener conferencing
“It’s important to know the true cost of our online behaviors and, by quantifying it, we can take action,” the researchers say. “As an example, our AirMiners conference was able to estimate our impact and purchase carbon removal offsets to make the event carbon negative.”
The researchers’ system for gauging the energy usage from a virtual conference looks at:
- Life cycle emissions: The raw materials and resources needed to build and distribute the computers used, as well the electricity needed to run them
- Network data transfer: Energy computers use for uploading and downloading data
- Server energy usage
- Monitor energy usage
- Room lighting
- Additional online meetings necessary for conference planning
- Emissions from conference-related website visits and search engine queries
For instance, computer emissions are gauged by looking at emissions over the full lifecycle of the product, while emissions from network data transfer were calculated using their energy consumption during the event.
A good first step for conference organizers would be to try and improve the energy efficiency of any hardware and software used during the conference. For instance, Zoom and other delivery platforms may be able to decrease data rates whilst still ensuring good quality, simply by updating their servers and software.
Similarly, individuals could lower their emissions by not using the gallery view feature and disabling HD video on the conference video feed.
“In order to address climate change, we need to develop an awareness of the CO2 emissions associated with specific actions we take in our daily lives— similar to how we have learned to watch calories to maintain a healthy weight. Grant’s work quantifies this for the growing relevance of video conferences,” the researchers conclude.
