Lab life. Since the end of the restrictions on movement caused by the pandemic, central activities of the scientific world have resumed: congresses, conferences and other “workshops”. And, with them, air travel. But since they emit a lot of greenhouse gases, how can you reconcile the need to reduce your carbon footprint and the development of scientific activity?
“To answer and especially to get out of the false debates on the subject, you need data! »launches Tamara Ben Ari (Inrae), co-author of a study on the subject, published on October 19 in Environmental Research Letters. With six other colleagues from various disciplines (epidemiology, sociology, astrophysics, etc.), she shows, for the first time, a significant correlation between the number of flights carried out by researchers and their scientific visibility, measured by the number of publications and by an indicator, the h-index. When this number is N for a researcher, it means that at least N of his articles are cited N times by other scientists.
The study was based on a questionnaire sent to thousands of research staff in 2020 by the Labos 1point5 collective, of which the co-authors of the study are members, and which since 2019 has been urging French laboratories to measure and reduce their carbon footprint. Of the 6,700 responses, they retained 4,591 containing the number of flights in 2019 and the number of publications (between 2017 and 2019), and 1,690 with the number of flights and the h-index.
First observation, the publications and the number of thefts are unevenly distributed. The researchers in the sample published between 0 and 1,290 articles over the period with a median of 4. There are heavy travelers (record at 88 flights!) and those “allergic” to flying with 0 flights (the is 0.5 vol). The inequality is reflected in the fact that the 20% of the most frequent travelers made 53% of the flights and that the 20% least “agitated” accounted for only 3% of the flights. When the destinations were known, the carbon footprint was estimated at around 887 kilos of CO equivalent2or 13% of the average carbon footprint of a French person.
Young researchers travel less
Second observation, the more a researcher flies, the more he publishes and the higher his h-index. More specifically, the median number of publications goes from 3, for researchers who do not travel, to 15, for those who make more than 20 flights. The median of the h-index goes from 17 to 29. A statistical test also shows that this correlation cannot be explained by age, discipline or gender, and therefore that the link between “scientific productivity” et ” visibility “ is solid. “It surprised me, because another study in Canada, in 2019, on a lower workforce had not found such a correlation”, explains Olivier Berné, from the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse. In the article, however, the authors manage to reconcile the two results by taking into account the differences between Europe and the United States.
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