Sustainability and Carbon Emissions of Future Accelerators

TL;DR

This paper assesses the carbon footprint of future particle physics accelerators, emphasizing construction emissions and exploring strategies to enhance sustainability in the field.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive estimate of carbon impacts across various activities in future accelerators and discusses mitigation strategies to reduce emissions.

Findings

Civil construction dominates carbon emissions

Travel and computing contribute noticeably to emissions

Mitigation strategies can significantly reduce overall carbon footprint

Abstract

Future accelerators and experiments for energy-frontier particle physics will be built and operated during a period in which society must also address the climate change emergency by significantly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. The carbon intensity of many particle-physics activities is potentially significant, such that as a community particle physicists could create substantially more emissions than average citizens, which is currently more than budgeted to limit the increase in average global temperatures. We estimate the carbon impacts of potential future accelerators, detectors, computing, and travel, and find that while emissions from civil construction dominate by far, some other activities make noticeable contributions. We discuss potential mitigation strategies, and research and development activities that can be pursued to make particle physics more sustainable.