A community to generate a behavioral change

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A community to generate behavioral change in researcher mobility

Our project is to implement a community of researchers that will think and propose solutions to reduce carbon footprint linked to conference mobility.

Team

LUNNOM
Augustine Jaccard, Tilia Gerber, Chloé Jeannet et Alice Wallef

Contact details

alice.wallef@unil.ch

Mobility of researchers

L’UNIL a inscrit dans son plan d’intention la volonté d’être une institution pionnière sur la durabilité, notamment en favorisant la recherche et l’enseignement de cette problématique, mais aussi en développant une gestion modèle du campus et de l’institution en elle-même.

A community to generate behavioral change in researcher mobility

Our project is to implement a community of researchers that will think and propose solutions to reduce carbon footprint linked to conference mobility.

Solution context

Researcher's mobility linked to conferences is a problem because it generated an important carbon footprint.

Solution description

Our solution is to build a community relolving on three main ideas:

A workshop that would present the problem of researcher mobility and help researches think about solution that fit their needs. There are three main ideas that we want to share during those workshops:
- The important role of researchers have in the carbon footprint of their lab and how they can change this.
- Show them strategies to change the way they think about confereces. e.g. Make them write a lists of the conferences they plan to attend in the next year and ask them to categorize them in levels of importance. The idea is to identify conferences that they need to attend, and conferences that they could attend online because only the content is interesting to them or conferences that they attend only for the networking which could be replaced by something else.
- Make them come up with alternatives to gonig to conferences. e.g. for a congerence they attend only for the networking, they could just contact the people they are intereted in and meet in a closer location. Also make them think about the personal benefice of those solutions.
A forum where members of the community could discuss issues linked to mobility and develop alternatives to traveling to conferences. They could also share the results they found while performing the workshop.
A carbon emission analyses to measure the carbon footprint linked to mobility for each lab, or department, or university. This number could be a way for the lab/department/university to show their involvment in reduction of their carbon footprint. This would be something that they could publicly share, on social networks as Linkdin or ResearchGate, which might lead to a competition between labs/departments/universities.

This would lead to a change of behavior from researchers and a self sustainable community, which would lead to a carbon footprint reduction.

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Lausanne