Introduction
ICSE strives to mitigate the environmental impact of both its conference editions operations and the actions of its participants.
While onsite scientific conferences are essential for knowledge exchange and collaboration, they often come with environmental drawbacks. Large gatherings like ICSE entail significant travel, resulting in carbon emissions from transportation, and require resources for venue construction and operation, leading to waste generation and resource depletion. Additionally, food and beverage consumption at conferences can contribute to food waste and plastic pollution.
To address these challenges, ICSE advocates for sustainable practices, such as selecting conference venues with strong sustainability credentials, implementing waste reduction measures like recycling and composting programs, offering eco-friendly food and beverage options, and minimizing transportation. This proactive approach aims to balance the benefits of in-person gatherings with the imperative to minimize environmental harm.
This page provides an overview of ICSE 2024’s sustainability efforts, which may evolve based on ongoing evaluation and feedback throughout the conference.
Practices endorsed by ICSE 2024
Based on the practices suggested by the ICSE steering committee (sub-committee Sustainable ICSE), we selected a set to make ICSE 2024 more sustainable.
Raising awareness on travel footprint
- Understand participants’ travel footprint, by incorporating in the registration form a CO2 calculator.
- Offer walking distance accommodation to conference participants.
- Provide detailed information about ground travel to reach the conference, empathizing how easy it is to move around Lisbon on public transportation and on foot.
- Choose nearby locations for the social events and use electric trams and cars when needed.
- Offer information on walking distance restaurants, cultural events, historic points of attraction, etc.
Helping out
- Sponsors paying full cost for in-person participation of students in need from Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Morocco. The important remark here is that this cost is being paid in advance, and not on a refund basis
At the Venue
- Paperless registration and social events (e.g., banquet).
- Recycling bins (paper, plastic/metal, glass) in common areas and rooms.
- No table skirts on tables in meeting rooms.
- Use electronic signage instead of paper, or use recycled and biodegradable materials for paper signs, boards, badges, strings, packages and bags.
- Location with close proximity to transportation hubs (airports) and hotels.
- Promote recycle & reuse behaviors: challenge with local NGOs.
Food & Catering
- Reduce the amount of animal-based products, and provide plant-based choices for all meals.
- Use the sustainable food app “Too Good to Go” to handle food leftovers efficiently.
- Rely on local food sources when possible.
- Use tap water or water stations to reduce plastic water/soda bottles.
- Use reusable cutlery, glasses, mugs and plates, eliminating paper and plastic utensils.
- Avoid polystyrene, plastic wrapping and bubblewrap.
Social footprint
- In-person survey ICSE 2024 to understand the social value of the conference program in terms of technical paper presentations, social events, workshops, etc.
- Post-mortem analysis of the survey results to propose improved guidelines and changes in practices for ICSE 2025.
Conference Material
- Digital announcements for sponsor materials, instead of printed ones.
- Reduce printed signposts to a minimum.
- Use Spotme app for the conference program, rooms, etc.
- No gifts to all participants by default.
Prizes
- Collaborate with ONG Associação Zero, and plan Prizes in “tree plantations”.
Practices not endorsed for ICSE 2024
Hybrid, blended, or fully virtual?
Traveling by plane is by far the most negative environmental impact of a conference. However, and according to [1], the “social benefits of direct personal and globally oriented exchange can probably not be outweighed by environmental savings”.
For this reason, ICSE 2024 will not be an online conference. Instead, we strongly encourage train travel to reach the venue, and will engage our participants in activities to compensate for the environmental negative impact of traveling.
References
[1] Sabrina Neugebauer, Maren Bolz, Rose Mankaa, Marzia Traverso, How sustainable are sustainability conferences? – Comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment of an international conference series in Europe, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 242, 2020, 118516, ISSN 0959-6526, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.118516