Dear colleagues:
Most of us can agree that the planet is warming up at an alarming rate, and that humans are contributing to this. Global warming and ensuing climate change has many causes and we won’t go into detail here as a lot of information is easily accessible.
We would like to talk about contributing to a solution. As academics, we believe that we have a lot of power to make the world a better place (knowledge is power!), and also that actions speak louder than words. Let’s start reducing our collective environmental impact on the planet now! There are many ways we can do this, and we cannot make you share our personal beliefs, but we do invite you to join us in our efforts to make SysMus17 a conference that makes an active effort to reduce our impact. This is what we propose:
- Travel in a more eco-friendly way. With ESCOM’s generous support, we hope to encourage you to reduce your personal emissions while travelling to and from SysMus17 – we’re looking for low/zero carbon, creative solutions!
- We will have virtual presentations to reduce travel for those who cannot attend in person due to cost, care or other reasons.
- We will work to have a low-waste conference, meaning things like making the abstract book available online, only offering printed abstract books for those that request it, using recycled conference badges, not having disposable cups at coffee breaks and offering food from sustainable sources.
- We will seek funds from external sources to offset any remaining carbon emissions not covered by participants.
We hope that a successful, low-carbon and low-waste conference will be an example for future conferences, especially as this is a student-led initiative. If this is important to us, which from conversations with friends in the field, we believe it is, let’s show everyone just how much.
With hope for the future,
Sarah, Peter, Katie Rose, Pedro and Marcus
SysMus17 Committee
p.s. here are some useful links to go green!
Emissions calculators:
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx
http://footprint.wwf.org.uk
http://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
Zero waste: http://www.trashisfortossers.com
Hitchhiking: http://hitchwiki.org/en/Top_tips
Offsetting options:
http://treesforlife.org.uk/work/action-plan
http://cotap.org/offset-carbon-footprint