Work

Know your footprint - Evaluation of the professional carbon footprint for individual researchers in high energy physics and related fields

Year: 2024

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: With the ever-increasing requirement for sustainability in the modern age, it is crucial to understand the environmental impact of High Energy Physics (HEP) and related fields, especially considering the field's high resource consumption. The Know your footprint initiative attempts to quantify the carbon footprints associated with four categories: Experiment, corresponding to the large infrastructure within HEP collaborations; Institute, accounting for the emissions from research institutes and universities; Computing, covering the resource consumption for data analysis and running simulations; and Travel, accommodating business trips for conferences, workshops, and meetings. A survey for self-evaluation was devised based on these studies, enabling colleagues to estimate their professional footprint. The Know your footprint campaign aims to raise awareness, identify the dominant contributing factors to the HEP-related footprint, and motivate the community to move towards more sustainable research practices. These proceedings summarise the above-mentioned efforts.

Source: International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP)

DOI: 10.22323/1.476.1230

Authors: Naman Kumar Bhalla, Valerie Lang, Simran Sunil Gurdasani, Pardis Niknejadi

Institutions: University of Freiburg, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY

Language: English

Topic: Environmental Impact and Sustainability

Subfield: Environmental Engineering

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Climate action

Open Access status: hybrid

OpenAlex ID: W4405599279