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?

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