Mobility Environmental Profile in the Framework of a Research Project: The Case of “CRESTING”

Scientific conferences can be significant for knowledge sharing, networking, debates and the development of new ideas/projects and solutions for scientific research. However, the resource demands of such activities and the environmental impacts connected to them are usually neglected. One of the major environmental aspects in conferences are those related to the participants’ transport, with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) being one of the methodologies used to assess them. This study considered the European research project “Cresting” and the participation of Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in conferences/workshops in the countries involved in the project. The analysis included the travels made by the ESRs and by means of an LCA software. The results obtained for one of the impact categories (climate change) were then compared for one of the participants to the ones provided by four travel carbon emission calculation tools in order to assess their robustness. The results demonstrated that the main contributor to the overall climate change-related impact was air transport (mainly intercontinental). Furthermore, the impact categories of Marine Ecotoxicity and Human Carcinogenic Toxicity were found to be also mostly influenced (due to air transport). Finally, not all simplified tools provided similar results to the ones calculated by the full LCA software.