Fighting Climate Change: Mapping the Carbon Footprint Flows of COP 28

With each additional COP conference, there is a growing chorus of criticism due to the high carbon footprint associated with the event, mostly due to the intensive amount of international air travel. There has also been a growing chorus of voices raising the related question as to whether COP conferences can become virtual to play a greater leadership role in the reduction of carbon emissions and serve as a good role model for what it is advocating to the rest of the world. COVID19 demonstrated that it was possible for billions of people to adapt and rapidly change behavior from physical face-to-face meetings to virtual online ones. Even after COVID was over, many meetings that have migrated permanently to online. In this study, we consider the feasibility of migrating COP from a currently high to a low carbon emission event, mainly by minimizing the amount of air travel and cutting indirect carbon emissions. The study is framed as an optimization problem, a tradeoff between the carbon emissions of tens of thousands of long distance flights to one global COP destination and the carbon emissions of many shorter trips to an increased number of regional destinations.