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

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 is 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 assessed the travels made by the ESRs by means of 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 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 also found to be mostly influenced (due to air transport). Finally, not all simplified tools provided similar results to those calculated by the full LCA software.