The travel-related carbon dioxide emissions of atmospheric researchers

[摘要] Most atmospheric scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions have alreadycaused significant changes to the globalclimate system and that these changes will accelerate in the near future.At the same time, atmospheric scientists who – like other scientists – rely on internationalcollaboration and information exchange travel a lot and, thereby, cause substantial emissions of CO₂.In this paper, the CO₂ emissions of the employees working at an atmospheric researchinstitute (the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, NILU) caused by all types ofbusiness travel (conference visits, workshops, field campaigns, instrument maintainance, etc.)were calculated for the years 2005–2007.It is estimated that more than 90% of the emissions were caused by air travel, 3%by ground travel and 5% by hotel usage.The travel-related annual emissions were between 1.9 and 2.4 t CO₂ per employee orbetween 3.9 and 5.5 t CO₂ per scientist.For comparison, the total annual per capita CO₂ emissions are 4.5 t worldwide, 1.2 tfor India, 3.8 t for China, 5.9 t for Sweden and 19.1 t for Norway.The travel-related CO₂ emissions of a NILU scientist, occurring in 24 days of a yearon average, exceed the global average annual per capita emission.Norway's per-capita CO₂ emissions are among the highest in the world, mostly becauseof the emissions from the oil industry.If the emissions per NILU scientist derived in this paper are taken as representative forthe average Norwegian researcher, travel by Norwegian scientists would nevertheless accountfor a substantial 0.2% of Norway's total CO₂ emissions.Since most of the travel-related emissions are due to air travel, water vapor emissions,ozone production and contrail formation further increase the relative importance ofNILU's travel in terms of radiative forcing.

[学科分类] 大气科学