Climate & environment

Study: Climate scientists burn half their CO2 budget - in one week

Christina Nordh

Published 2024-05-20 15.31

An image from Puerto Rico trying to understand how the Earth can recover from extreme weather due to increasingly higher temperatures. Photo: AP

Climate scientists say that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced.

But some of them burn half their CO2 budget in a week, shows a new study from Lund University.

Participants at an annual international water conference in the years 2004–2023 have been reviewed. The conference is organized by the Association for the sciences of limnology and oceanography, it is attended by an average of 1,500 people.

In recent years, the conference has been held in places such as Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Mallorca.

The average emissions from each participant and conference were 1.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

The level of emissions per person per year that we need to get down to according to the Paris Agreement is 2.3 tons in 2030 and 1.4 tons in 2040, writes Lund University in a press release.

Photo: Audrey McAvoy/AP

- Among the researchers who participate in these conferences, there is deep knowledge and great commitment to climate change and how it affects aquatic systems. In fact, 50 percent of all presentations last year touched on climate change. There was also a big focus on the fact that this knowledge needs to be "translated" and "lead to change", not just communicated within science, says Emma Kritzberg.

In addition to Lund University, the University of Lausanne, Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg have also participated in the study.

It is published in Limnology and Oceanography Letters: ”The elephant in the conference room: Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Aquatic Science Meetings”

            

           Photo: Jonas Ekstromer / TT News Agency