Andrea Gokus

@agokus.bsky.social

64 Followers 52 Following

McDonnell PostDoc Fellow at WashU in Saint Louis, working on active galactic nuclei. Enthusiastic about music 🎶 , space 🚀, dogs🐕 and saving planet Earth 🌎.

Scatter plot of the meeting size versus the average emissions per participant. Most meetings have a size of 30 to less than 200 participants. No clear correlation is visible.
Scatter plot of the percentage of local participants versus the average emissions per participant. The average greenhouse gas emissions per meeting participant decreases with increasing fraction of local attendees.
Histograms showing the distribution of average carbon emissions per participant and meeting. Different colors indicate the continent on which the meeting took place. The left figure shows the numbers for conferences, which peak at 1 t of CO2-equivalent emissions and ranges up to 4t of average emissions. The right figure shows the data for schools, which peaks at slightly less emissions of 0.6 t of CO2e, ranging above 1.5 t.
World map showing where meetings, both conferences (circles) and schools (squares), took place. A color scale indicates the average emission per participant per conference and the size of the symbols reveals the total emissions. Meetings are heavily clustered in Europe and on the east and west coast of the United states. There is very few meetings on the African and South American continent. Meetings in Oceania as well as in Hawai'i have the highest carbon footprint per participant.
Screenshot of the header from the published paper in the journal PNAS Nexus. The title of the paper is "Astronomy's climate emissions: Global travel to scientific meetings in 2019". The authors are, in the order of the author list: Andrea Gokus, Knud Jahnke, Paul M. Woods, Vanessa A. Moss, Volker Ossenkopf-Okada, Elena Sacchi, Adam R. H. Stevens, Leonard Burtscher, Cenk Kayhan, Hannah Dalgleish, Victoria Grinberg, Travis Rector, Jan Rybizki, and Jacob White.