Responsible Travel Statement


Our overarching goal is to carry out cutting‑edge and relevant research on how people use land, how that impacts biodiversity, and which conservation strategies can effectively mitigate these impacts. We work in many geographic settings, often focusing on regions that are understudied, where land‑use dynamics are drastic and threats to biodiversity are strong. Such regions are typically far from Berlin. As a lab, we also strive to enable early‑career researchers to achieve their personal goals and the careers they envision. All of this sometimes requires travelling — for example, to participate in international projects, to carry out field work, to establish and maintain collaborations, or to present at scientific meetings. Yet the considerable benefits of travelling come with major environmental impacts, particularly greenhouse‑gas emissions. As a lab, we therefore aim to minimize the environmental impact of our work by carefully weighing the costs and benefits of every trip.
Regarding travel, we therefore commit to the following four principles:

  1. Evaluating the necessity of every trip – and make it worthwhile. We are highly selective when deciding for trips and substitute them through online meetings wherever possible. If, we take trips, we make them worthwhile. This can include making less frequent, but longer trips (e.g. field work), combining travels (e.g., field work and a conference) or waiting a year for attending a conference (e.g. a conference in Europe vs. overseas).

  2. Using more sustainable modes of transportation. The vast majority of travel-related emissions our lab produces are through flying (e.g., >90% in 2017-2019). We commit to avoiding air travel, wherever possible, by replacing short-haul flights with other modes of transportation and by being particularly cautious when deciding for long-haul flights (that cause the majority of our travel emissions).

  3. Monitoring and documenting our climate impacts. To help inform our decisions about future travel and to be transparent, we are monitoring our travel-related emissions and publish them annually on our website. Our goal is to reduce our overall per-capita emissions.

  4. Offsetting unavoidable emissions. For all unavoidable trips (>250km), we commit to carry out offsetting. We realize that offsetting is the last effective way of reducing our climate impact of our travelling, emphasizing the importance of the first two points.

Travel Emissions

These graphs show the travel emissions of the lab.

Travel Emissions 2025
Travel-related emissions of the Conservation Biogeography Lab. Left: total emissions. Right: per capita emissions © Conservation Biogeography Lab / HU Berlin