News:

• 3 March 2025: Deadline for Abstract Submission
• Mid- April 2025: Acceptance Notifications sent to participants.

The aim of this special session is to evaluate the global impact of astronomical research and open discussions within the European astronomical community.

Given concerns over climate change, the astronomical community should do its share of the Paris Agreement, find a new balance between research and collaboration needs, and innovate ways of reducing our carbon footprint. Given the high profile of the topic globally and the increasing interest of the astronomical community, we should go beyond just raising awareness and start identifying specific challenges and exploring viable mitigation strategies.

Programme

• Robust measures of carbon footprint: Measuring the impact of an institution, research activity, or scientific event is a necessary step towards reducing it. Robust and consistent metrics are key to evaluate the impact of mitigation strategies.
• Astronomical Facilities and Computation: Astronomical facilities have an impact associated with construction and maintenance, but an increasingly large part of the energy budget is dedicated to data storage and computation.
• Beyond the carbon footprint:The carbon footprint is an easy and useful indicator of sustainability, but inherently limited. In addition to energy, astronomical facilities and activities consume space and resources and produce residues (waste) that impact the land and affect local communities.

Scientific organisers

The EAS Advisory Committee on sustainability:

• Corentin Cadiou (Co-chair) (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, France)
• Marta González (Co-chair) (Universidad Internacional Valenciana, Spain)
• Zuzanna Kocjan (University of Maryland, USA)
• Robert Massey(Royal Astronomical Society, UK)
• Susanne Pfalzner (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany)
• Pat Roche(University of Oxford, UK)
• Fionagh Thomson(Durham University, UK)
• Floris van der Tak(SRON, Netherlands)

Contact

sustainability-eas @ listes.unige.ch