Low-carbon research

A research network that studies carbon has to account for its own. Ours is built to reduce travel rather than to offset it afterwards.

What we do

• Fly-less events. Members in the Quebec–Ontario corridor gather by rail and road. Given how much of the network sits in that corridor, this is the single largest reduction available to us.
• Hybrid by default. Symposia, Research Cluster gatherings, Summer Institutes, speaker series and fieldwork preparation all run hybrid. Remote participation is a first-class option, not an accommodation.
• Staggered field intensives. The six OAiS Labs are spread across seven years so that a given researcher travels to a distant site rarely, and so that a single trip serves preparation, fieldwork and mobilisation at once.
• Rotating hosts. Symposia move between Concordia, Brock, York, McMaster, Trent and ASU, distributing travel burden rather than concentrating it on one location year after year.
• Asynchronous collaboration. Cluster work happens in writing and in recorded sessions across five time zones, which serves both carbon reduction and the accessibility commitments in our equity plan.

This website

The same logic applies here. This site is statically generated and served without client-side data fetching. The world map is inline SVG rather than a tiled map service, which removes hundreds of network requests per view. Type is subset and self-hosted. There is no analytics script, no tag manager, and no embedded video autoplay.

What we are not doing

We are not purchasing offsets in place of reductions. The network's own research is, in part, about what happens when carbon becomes a financial instrument — it would be incoherent to run our operations on the mechanism we study.