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SSI Carbon Study

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title SSI Carbon Study
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/25532
 
Creator Waring, Timothy
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description This file is intended to carefully and publically document the stages of data analysis and visualization that contributed to this research project. The following R code, output and annotations accompany a study of the University of Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative's carbon emissions between 2009 and 2011. This project was the result of work by Mark Anderson, Mario Teisl, and Eva Manandhar in School of Economics at the University of Maine. The published research is available at timwaring.wordpress.com. #### Abstract > This paper presents new data on the carbon emissions generated by travel undertaken for a major sustainability science research effort. Previous research has estimated CO2 emissions generated by individual scientists, by entire academic institutions, or by international climate conferences. Here, we sought to investigate the size, distribution and factors affecting the carbon emissions of travel for sustainability research in particular. Reported airline and automobile travel of participants in Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative were used to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to research-related travel over a three-year period. Our methodology is simple and with planning can be applied at any scale. Carbon emissions varied substantially by researcher and by purpose of travel. Travel for the purpose of attending academic conferences created the largest carbon footprint of all types of travel. This result suggests that alternative networking and dissemination models are needed to replace the high carbon costs of annual society meetings. This research adds to literature that questions whether the cultural demands of contemporary academic careers are compatible with climate stabilization. We argue that precise record keeping and routine analysis of travel data are necessary to track and reduce the climate impacts of sustainability research. We summarize the barriers to behavioral change at individual and organizational levels and conclude with suggestions for reducing climate impacts of travel undertaken for sustainability research. The data and code are provided as is, and may contain errors or imperfections. The data for this project is in two datafiles. There is no g
ood reason for this fact, I just haven't had the time to merge them appropriately. They both come from the same source data. Like I said, no good reason. This analysis document was compiled in RStudio using the R Markdown functionality to intersperse code, results, and text. This R code uses knitr, plyr, and ggplot2.
 
Date 2014-04-16