Another special session I was listening to at ISMB 2020 was the Green stream. Several talks dealt with climate change and its relation to bioinformatics and computational biology. Two of them I found particularly interesting, one calculating the carbon footprint of ISMB itself and the other calculating the footprint of specific bioinformatics tools.

I believe most people have realised how important the issue of human-made climate change is and I assume that everyone has heard about some aspects of our life that are causing particularly many emissions compared to certain alternatives. For example, train rides vs. short-haul flights, eating the food’s food (veggies) vs. mass production of meat or renewable energies vs. coal plants, just to name some that are rather easy to change. Admittedly, I have also underestimated the urgency of the issue and I found this plot quite convincing:

What can we as computational researchers do about it?

I think the key answer from all talks is awareness. While research in general, with labs, computations and conferences, has a higher carbon footprint than other more localised industries, we can change things to reduce this footprint and contribute to the solution. Being aware of the individual components of this footprint is the first step.

Michael Inouye (University of Cambridge & Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute) presented a project by him and two of his students: green-algorithms.org (Lannelongue, L., Grealey, J. & Inouye, M., Green Algorithms: Quantifying the carbon emissions of computation. arXiv:2007.07610 (2020).). It is a platform for computational researchers that estimates the carbon footprint of their algorithms:

With this tool at hand, they analysed some common bioinformatics applications and he pointed out that even simple updates of research software can have a substantial effect on its carbon footprint. For example, an update of BOLT-LMM for GWAS analysis can save up to approximately 70% of emissions.

Another important component of our work, and therefore our footprint, are research conferences. Alex Bateman (EMBL-EBI) presented the carbon footprint estimation, just for flights, of ISMB 2019 (Basel, Switzerland) and the hypothetical footprint of the non-virtual ISMB 2020 (Montreal, Canada).

ISMB 2019 in Europe caused almost 1000 tonnes of carbon (equivalent) emissions, whereas ISMB 2020 in North America would have caused about 200 tonnes less because fewer people would have attended. The per-person average is roughly the same though. To set this into perspective, the global average for one person and year is about four tonnes.

Are virtual conferences the solution?

I found this year’s virtual ISMB a very interesting experiment as it would save a substantial amount of emissions. Especially when considering how many different fields hold international conferences.

While I definitely missed the possibility of talking to people in person, during breaks and during poster sessions, I found the mixture of pre-recorded talks (with subsequent live Q&A) and live keynotes almost better than the in-person talks. Basically, every talk I listened to started on time, had a couple of questions answered live and was generally easier to understand because speakers had the chance to record themselves until they were comfortable with their talk. And if you did miss something during the session you could replay it a few hours later.

Posters were available in form of a PDF with an additional 5-7 minute pre-recorded poster talk. Poster presenters were asked to be present during two 1.5h time slots to answer questions. I think this could be improved as questions and answers were just posted beneath the poster and had no live or private aspect. I felt this increased the barrier of asking ‘stupid’ questions to posters that are not within your area of expertise but still make you curious.

All in all, I think it was a successful experiment and I would attend another virtual conference – even when there are in-person conferences again. Maybe conferences could alternate between virtual and in-person and ideally make it standard to have both options at the same time? I think ISMB would be perfect to try this out as it alternates between North America and Europe. This would probably save most of the emissions as Europeans could primarily attend ISMBs in Europe and dial into ISMBs in North America and vice versa.