The study, published in the journal Magnetic Resonance, focused on the flagship meetings of the magnetic resonance community: EUROMAR, the Experimental Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Conference (ENC) and the International Conference on Magnetic Resonance in Biological Systems (ICMRBS). These events draw between roughly 470 and 1,100 participants and last four to six days. The team gathered participant lists from conference organizers, apps and abstract books, then used automated text extraction and manual curation to link each attendee’s institutional affiliation to a city of origin. From there, they computed the presumed travel trajectory of every participant and converted those distances into emissions.

The conversion was deliberately rigorous. For journeys shorter than 400 kilometres one way, the researchers assumed train travel, using actual rail distances calculated through the Carbontracer service rather than straight-line estimates. Longer trips were assumed to be flown. Crucially, the team refused to rely on the optimistic figures often quoted by railway companies. They added an infrastructure surcharge of about 25 grams of CO2 equivalent per passenger kilometre to account for the construction and maintenance of rail lines and the heating and cooling of stations — costs that most carbon calculators quietly ignore. Drawing on data from the Austrian Federal Railways and a study of the Austrian rail network, they estimated that indirect emissions roughly multiply the direct emissions of a train journey by a factor of about 2.5.

For aviation, the accounting was similarly unforgiving. The researchers applied a radiative forcing index, which captures the fact that greenhouse gases emitted at altitude warm the planet more powerfully than the same gases released at ground level, with values ranging from 1.3 to 3 depending on altitude. They also corrected the great-circle distance between cities by an uplift factor of 8 percent to reflect real-world flight paths, holding patterns and takeoff inefficiencies, and added an estimated 15 percent for airport infrastructure. Even so, they acknowledge their flight figures are likely underestimates by about 20 percent, because connecting flights — which can add up to 100 kilograms of CO2 per additional takeoff — were not modelled.

The headline numbers are striking. Total travel emissions for a typical EUROMAR conference came to 700 to 900 tonnes, or about 1.2 to 1.3 tonnes of CO2 per participant when flights are assumed beyond 400 kilometres, dropping to roughly one tonne if attendees take trains up to 800 kilometres. For conferences held outside Europe, per-person emissions were two to three times higher, with intercontinental round trips reaching four to five tonnes. The geography of attendance matters enormously: more than 80 percent of EUROMAR participants typically come from Europe, and the most frequent one-way journey is between 800 and 1,200 kilometres. At the 2024 ICMRBS meeting in Seoul, 200 of about 580 participants were from the Republic of Korea, yet the per-person average excluding those local attendees exceeded 3.1 tonnes.

Perhaps the most provocative finding is how conference travel stacks up against the rest of a scientist’s carbon ledger. The team compared it with the emissions of actually doing magnetic resonance research: building and running NMR spectrometers with their supercooled magnets, powering cryogenics, computing, laboratory consumables, buildings and commuting. For a model facility with three spectrometers at 600, 700 and 800 megahertz shared by 20 researchers, the annual operating footprint ranged from 0.8 to 5 tonnes per person, depending on how fossil-heavy the national electricity grid is. In other words, attending a five-day EUROMAR conference can emit more carbon than running NMR experiments for an entire year in a country like France, where the grid is largely low-carbon. Traveling from Europe to the ENC meeting in California, the authors note, emits more CO2 than half a year of making samples, performing NMR and computing combined.

Accommodation, catering and the venue itself, by contrast, barely register. A three-star European hotel generates roughly 10 to 20 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per person per night, meals add perhaps 14 to 28 kilograms over a five-day meeting, and the venue contributes around 10 kilograms per attendee. All told, everything except travel amounts to a few tens of kilograms — meaning transportation accounts for the overwhelming majority of a conference’s footprint. The comparison with the global carbon budget is stark: the IPCC’s SR15 report estimated a remaining budget of about 420 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent for a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which distributes to roughly 4.5 tonnes per person per year in 2025 — a figure that must fall to zero by 2050. A single transatlantic conference trip can consume an entire annual allowance.

The study does not stop at diagnosis; it models remedies. Choosing more geographically central venues emerges as a powerful lever. The team used the EUROMAR 2024 attendee list to predict emissions if the meeting had been held in Frankfurt, Lyon or Vienna instead of more remote locations, and found that central sites could cut per-attendee emissions by more than a factor of two — a saving of roughly 500 to 800 tonnes for a conference the size of EUROMAR. A similar calculation for the ENC meeting suggested that moving it from California to the US East Coast would save about 25 percent, or 400 to 500 tonnes, thanks to shorter distances for European attendees and the density of NMR groups on the East Coast. The authors caution, however, that systematically favoring central locations disadvantages colleagues in more distant regions, a trade-off that must be weighed.

Decentralized conferences offer another path. The researchers modelled a two-site EUROMAR in which participants travel to whichever hub is closer to their home institution, with plenary talks shared by video link. Savings of around 25 percent appeared realistic — consistent with earlier case studies that projected one-third reductions for three-hub conferences and up to 80 percent savings for split meetings. Fully online formats are in a different league altogether: videoconferencing generates an estimated 0.15 to 0.25 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per participant-hour, or about 1.6 kilograms per person for an eight-hour day, two to three orders of magnitude below in-person meetings. A large astronomy conference that went online reduced its footprint by a factor of 3,000. Online formats also broaden access, lifting barriers for junior scientists, caregivers and researchers at underfunded institutions — attendance at the largest European geoscience meeting rose by more than 60 percent when it moved online during the pandemic.

At the individual level, the choice between train and plane matters enormously. Across model journeys from cities such as Frankfurt, Vienna and Paris to prospective EUROMAR venues in Oulu, Gothenburg and Lyon, train travel saved between 75 and 95 percent of emissions compared with flying — a fourfold to twentyfold reduction — even after the team’s deliberately conservative accounting of rail infrastructure. Even in worst-case scenarios with low radiative forcing assumptions and night trains with reduced capacity, trains still saved at least 40 percent. The authors also point to behavioral evidence that trimming travel need not cost careers: a survey of German scientists found respondents attended about three conferences per year on average, and while 8 percent of postdocs reported receiving a job offer through conference travel, a separate study of air travel and scholarly metrics found no significant relationship between the volume of flying and research output measured by indicators such as the h-index. The team hopes their open data and scripts will help conference organizers and individual scientists make informed, quantitatively grounded choices — and spark a community-wide conversation about how the scientific meeting, one of academia’s most cherished traditions, can survive the transition to a net-zero world.

Subject of Research: Carbon emissions from conference travel in the magnetic resonance research community and strategies to reduce them

Article Title: Quantifying the carbon footprint of conference travel: the case of NMR meetings

Article References: Kapoor, L. N., Ružičková, N., Živadinović, P., Leitner, V., Sisak, M. A., Mweka, C., Dobbelaere, J., Katsaros, G., & Schanda, P. (2025). Quantifying the carbon footprint of conference travel: the case of NMR meetings. Magnetic Resonance, 6(2), 243-256. https://doi.org/10.5194/mr-6-243-2025

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/mr-6-243-2025

Keywords: carbon footprint, conference travel, magnetic resonance, NMR, greenhouse gas emissions, EUROMAR, train versus plane, academic mobility, climate mitigation, sustainable science, virtual conferences, aviation emissions

The intellectual roots of green chemistry stretch back further than many readers might expect. The editorial traces the discipline’s origins to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which alerted the public to the unintended consequences of widespread chemical use, particularly pesticides accumulating in food chains and ecosystems. That early cautionary tale gradually matured into a constructive engineering philosophy. In 1998, Paul Anastas and John Warner codified the field’s practical framework in their Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry, a set of design guidelines covering everything from waste prevention and atom economy to the use of safer solvents and renewable feedstocks. What began as a set of aspirational rules has, over the past decades, become a toolkit that academia and industry apply daily, yielding safer reagents and solvents, reduced emissions, effective catalysis, renewable raw materials, circular strategies for chemicals and materials, cleaner energy and water, and contributions to global climate change mitigation.

Perhaps the most striking theme in the inaugural editorial is the discipline’s pivot from reactive cleanup to predictive design. Green chemistry, the authors argue, is increasingly embracing computational and quantitative approaches that embed sustainability at the earliest stages of research and development, long before a single gram of material is synthesized. Modelling tools and thermodynamic insight can now guide the selection of safer solvents, including emerging classes such as deep eutectic systems, and inform the rational design of catalytic and reaction pathways before extensive experimental screening begins. This represents a fundamental shift in how chemists work: instead of testing dozens of solvent systems in the laboratory and discarding the failures, researchers can screen candidates in silico and advance only the most promising, least hazardous options to the bench.

Computer-aided process design takes this logic to the scale of entire manufacturing routes. These frameworks integrate environmental metrics such as the E-factor, the ratio of waste generated to product obtained, and energy consumption directly into synthetic planning, allowing chemists and chemical engineers to optimize routes for reduced waste and improved efficiency. In parallel, in silico toxicology, quantitative structure-activity relationship modeling, and machine learning approaches enable early-stage screening of hazards and exposure risks, aligning chemical innovation with regulatory requirements and societal expectations before products reach the market. The editorial describes this convergence as a movement from reactive mitigation toward predictive, design-oriented strategies for sustainability, a reframing that could reshape how the chemical industry approaches everything from pharmaceutical synthesis to commodity materials.

The journal’s declared scope is remarkably broad, reflecting green chemistry’s position as an interdisciplinary crossroads. Among the priority topics are chemical degradation, including the breakdown of antibiotics, fertilizers, dyes, and chemical residues using advanced oxidation methods and controlled degradation under specific environmental conditions. Chemical recycling receives its own emphasis, spanning molecular-level processing, the recovery of precious metals from electronic waste, and technologies such as pyrolysis, gasification, depolymerization, and solvolysis. Waste prevention and management covers source reduction, on-site treatments like neutralization, filtration, precipitation, and detoxification, responsible disposal, and even digital inventory systems designed to prevent chemical stockpiling and wastage in laboratories and storerooms.

Circular economy principles feature prominently throughout the scope. The journal invites work on atom economy, waste valorisation, and the design of biodegradable materials, alongside energy efficiency in chemical manufacturing and application. That last category includes process optimization, energy-efficient manufacturing techniques such as microwave-assisted, photochemical, and flow chemistry reactions, and the integration of computational modeling to reduce carbon footprints and manufacturing costs. Green catalysis forms another pillar, encompassing biocatalytic, enzyme-assisted, nanocatalytic, photocatalytic, and organocatalytic reactions, as well as energy-efficient and highly selective heterogeneous catalysts and the emerging field of predictive catalysis. Green synthesis topics include single-step reactions, the use of bio-based materials, plant extracts, natural products, and microorganisms, and cost-effective, environmentally friendly manufacturing processes that minimize energy consumption.

Renewable resources and safer chemicals round out the scientific agenda. The journal seeks research on biomass and agricultural waste as feedstocks, non-depletable raw materials, bioplastics, biofuels, and alternatives to fossil fuels. On the safety side, it calls for computational approaches to designing safer chemicals, the substitution of traditional toxic solvents with safer alternatives, and strategies to avoid bioaccumulation and environmental persistence. Sustainable chemistry topics extend to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, data-driven sustainability metrics, and life-cycle management that follows materials from raw material extraction through manufacturing, usage, and disposal. The editorial also emphasizes systemic thinking, integrating environmental, economic, and social factors into chemical manufacturing, and highlights sustainable materials and products designed to be benign by design, including reclaimed materials, compostable packaging, plant-based fibres, and eco-friendly consumer goods.

Notably, the journal’s scope extends beyond the laboratory bench into policy, education, and innovation. The editorial lists safer workplaces, accident prevention, and real-time analysis for pollution prevention among its interests, acknowledging that green chemistry’s impact depends as much on how chemicals are handled and regulated as on how they are synthesized. The editorial board, which brings together researchers and practitioners from across the breadth of the field, will handle manuscripts, recommend expert reviewers, advocate rigorous and constructive peer review, identify emerging directions for guest-edited Topical Collections, and promote the journal within professional communities. The board is expected to expand, and the journal welcomes new members who wish to contribute to its development.

The journal’s stance on what counts as publishable science is deliberately inclusive. The editors state that Discover Green Chemistry welcomes both breakthrough advances and well-validated incremental improvements, arguing that each contribution plays a pivotal role in the sustainable progress of the field. This is a meaningful position in a publishing landscape that often privileges novelty over reliability. Incremental improvements, such as a modestly greener solvent swap or a slightly more efficient catalyst, may lack headline appeal, but they are precisely the changes that accumulate into industrial transformation. The journal accepts full-length research articles, brief communications, comprehensive reviews, perspectives, and case studies, and it commits to publishing work that is not only innovative but also credible, scalable, and measurable in its sustainability impact.

The launch also carries a broader significance for open science. As a fully open access journal, Discover Green Chemistry makes its content freely available to researchers, industry practitioners, policymakers, and educators worldwide, removing paywalls that can slow the diffusion of sustainable technologies, particularly in developing economies where green chemistry solutions may be most urgently needed. The journal explicitly encourages submissions that address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, tying chemical research to global targets on clean water, affordable energy, climate action, and responsible production. Whether the new journal can help accelerate the transition from green chemistry as principle to green chemistry as default practice will depend on the community it attracts, but its inaugural editorial makes clear that the ambition is nothing less than a redesign of how molecules, materials, and processes are conceived from the very first sketch on the drawing board.

Subject of Research: The launch and scope of the open access journal Discover Green Chemistry

Article Title: Inaugural editorial for Discover Green Chemistry

Article References: Mahadadalkar, M. A., Choutipalli, V. S. K., & Bharti, R. (2026). Inaugural editorial for Discover Green Chemistry. Discover Green Chemistry, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44509-026-00005-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44509-026-00005-3

Keywords: green chemistry, Discover Green Chemistry, open access publishing, sustainability, Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry, chemical recycling, green catalysis, computational chemistry, renewable feedstocks, circular economy, safer solvents, Sustainable Development Goals