Making conference travel more sustainable by compensating Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Description

Carbon offsetting has become increasingly popular in the past years. Some universities even require their employees to offset their CO2 emissions before travel costs can be reimbursed. However, some also call this a modern form of indulgence trade and to some extent, this may be true. In this brownbag seminar organised by the ESRS Early Career Researcher Network, we will take a look at why carbon offsetting is important, how it works, what aspects we may want to look at when evaluating different options, and how offsetting a trip to the next in-person ESRS meeting in Seville could look like.

About the Speaker

Fridolin studied Physical Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. With his work, he tries to contribute to decreasing carbon emissions and thus making the world a little more sustainable. After graduating, he co-founded a start-up in Germany that focused on the use of residues in biogas plants. Since 2020, he has been working in the field of negative emissions at Pyronet in Basel, Switzerland. Pyronet develops heating systems based on pyrolysis for buildings and the agricultural sector. These new types of heating systems produce heat and biochar. The carbon contained in the wood is stored in biochar over the long term. As of today, biochar is the single biggest “negative emission technology” and one of only a few promising technologies behind “real” carbon offsetting (what “real” means will be discussed).