Fostering a Sustainable Community in Batteries

As with nearly all facets of daily life, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the traditional routines for science outreach and collaboration for battery researchers of all stripes. In-person conferences, meetings, lab visitations, and sabbaticals have largely been canceled or postponed, disrupting the typical avenues for communication between scientists, engineers, and researchers. Increasingly, researchers have developed creative ways to leverage electronic communication formats, harnessing growing online social media communities to create ad-hoc replacements for the essential functions served by these conventional in-person events. Concurrently, there has been a growing recognition of the fundamental tension between travel-intensive scientific networking and the stated goals of many research fields focused on mitigating anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation. Recent analysis of a European economics conference estimated roughly 0.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions per participant, while the University of California Santa Barbara recently estimated that conference travel accounts for roughly 30% of its carbon footprint. (1,2)