What happens to contaminants in the environment, how to assess their toxicity and the associated risk, and proposing innovative methods of decontamination : these are the questions that occupy you. To this end, you take samples from contaminated sites, both locally and in partner countries in the Global South. You carry out chemical and synchrotron analyses. Your carbon footprint stands at 6.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person per year. Will you manage to reduce this by 50%, whilst preserving the quality of your research and its impact as much as possible, without stifling the creativity of your young researchers ? The discussions are set to be lively in this team of strong personalities !

Your LMI team faces the greatest challenge, as it facilitates operational collaboration between French, Vietnamese and Thai researchers and engineers within the framework of a joint international laboratory. You will undertake numerous long-haul trips as well as oceanographic expeditions in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. Will you succeed in reducing your team’s carbon footprint by at least half (currently 9.0 tCO2eq/person/year) whilst maintaining the momentum of research and North-South collaborative links in a spirit of equity and climate justice ?

Your team is a multidisciplinary group comprising researchers in environmental sciences and the humanities and social sciences. Your research focuses on the relationships between societies and their environments in the northern and southern Mediterranean. Data collection (ecological surveys, sociological surveys, anthropological observations) and fieldwork in the study areas seem essential to inform our scientific inquiries. How, then, can we reconcile our research missions with our values whilst limiting our CO2 emissions ?

Ocean circulation, its current, past and future role in the climate and terrestrial biogeochemical cycles, as well as the functioning of open-ocean marine ecosystems, are the wide-ranging topics studied by your oceanography team. You primarily use computer models that must be run on national supercomputers. Links with teams conducting observations at sea exist, mainly in the form of joint supervision of PhD or post-doctoral students. The team’s current carbon footprint is 71 tCO2e per year, or 7.1 tCO2e/year/person. Your aim is to reduce this footprint by at least 50%, whilst maintaining the highest possible scientific standards and enabling young researchers to build their collaborations.

In this computer science team based in the Paris region, the research topics are varied : artificial intelligence, image processing, parallel computing and human-computer interaction. This work generally requires computing resources, mainly external computing centres. Publications are mainly presented at conferences rather than in journals, as these fields evolve very rapidly. In recent years, some research topics have shifted towards environmental applications, such as optimising energy consumption. Your current footprint : 6.7 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person per year. Your challenge : to reduce this by at least 50%, whilst maintaining the quality of your research as much as possible, and enabling research staff to keep their networks active !

Your team is studying the water cycle in South America (hence your carbon footprint of 6.3 tCO2e/year/person). The team is gradually moving towards the ‘critical zone’ community. There is a consensus on the scale of the damage done to this thin layer that sustains life. But discussions are becoming heated. Some believe that the team’s research is essential to “save the world” and must be maintained “whatever the cost”, whilst others are campaigning to scale back operations. In this tense atmosphere, will you manage to cut your carbon footprint by 50% whilst restoring a calm and stimulating atmosphere, essential for maintaining high-quality science in a field where progress is made through collective effort ?

Your team is recognised worldwide for its expertise in metamaterials and active materials. Environmental issues used to creep gently into your daily routine when you had to draft responses to calls for proposals and tout the merits of your research. The question of your research’s environmental impact becomes starkly real following an initial greenhouse gas assessment carried out at the lab. We then realise just how significant our activities are in terms of the carbon footprint ! The lab council has mandated a 50% reduction in our emissions. Will you be able to organise yourselves to drastically cut these emissions ? Will you manage to maintain exceptional, collaborative and stimulating research ?

You play the role of a team of researchers specialising in planetary formation, the solar system and exoplanets. The team is at the cutting edge of research, with observation time on the largest telescopes in Chile and Hawaii to detect new planets, a space mission project approved by the European Space Agency currently being set up, and laboratory experiments to interpret the observations. The only downside is that all this is sending your greenhouse gas footprint through the roof, at over 8.4 tCO2eq/person/year ! Tensions are beginning to rise within the team, between those who wish to capitalise on this momentum to boost their CVs or already see themselves as ERC grant recipients or authors in Nature, and those who are starting to worry and would prefer a more measured approach. In the competitive international environment of planetary formation research, these choices are not easy. Will you manage to cut your emissions by 50% in this context ?

You play the role of a team of researchers working on reconstructing past climates and the importance of Antarctica in the context of global warming. To do this, missions that are very costly in terms of both money and carbon emissions are required at Dome C in the centre of East Antarctica to carry out deep core sampling and reconstruct past climates. Furthermore, new measurements of snow, chemistry, climate and ice dynamics are emerging and are needed to refine models of the ice sheet’s evolution and quantify its impact, particularly on sea levels, with very significant societal consequences. All the more so as certain thresholds are currently being crossed regarding the ice sheet’s flow towards the ocean ! However, the carbon cost of field missions to these remote and very difficult-to-access regions is exorbitant. Is it worth the effort ?