[Coral-List] ICRS 2020 Regional Meetings

[Chelsie Counsell]

*For ICRS 2020, Franziska Elmer will be organizing a regional meeting for
the Caribbean, and Chelsie Counsell will be organizing a regional meeting
for the Pacific Islands in Honolulu. *Regional meetings, if embraced by the
community, still enable powerful face-to-face interactions through
networking and promotion of creative ideas. Regional meetings are not
asking scientists to watch webinars alone at home. In contrast, they can
connect people across the globe through one main event location and other
regional options. In addition to having attended a previous ICRS meeting
myself, I have also attended a variety of regional conferences. In my
experience, it can be much easier to have genuine face-to-face interactions
with researchers I haven’t worked with in the past, and to actively
participate in workshops at these smaller meetings when I am not just a
face in the crowd.

I would like to offer a *big thank you to the ICRS organizing committee for
all the great efforts they have already put into this year's
symposium's Green Strategy <http://www.icrs2020.de/green-strategy/>*. *As
part of minimizing the CO2 emissions of this symposium,** thank you to the
ICRS organizing committee for working on ways to live stream and record
talks. Any support ICRS can offer to provide content from the Bremen
meeting at the regional meetings is greatly appreciated.* I'll work on
logistics of recording talks from the regional meetings and sharing these,
perhaps through an ICRS youtube channel. One goal of science is to share
our research with others. How wonderful to be able to share it with anyone
who is interested, whether they are a politician, a CEO of a Fortune 500
company, a school teacher, or a scientist without the means of attending
the conference.

This new paradigm for research conferences with a central location linked
to regional meetings has a variety of details that still need to be sorted
out, input and support are welcome. As a start, I think that for *regional
meetings to be successful, they need (1) to be connected to the larger
meeting through shared content (plenary talks at a minimum), (2) to have
opportunities for the attending scientists to share their research, and (3)
to have workshop and networking opportunities.* We'll aim to get a call out
for abstracts in the next few weeks. These regional meetings will be the
first time ICRS will have concurrent regional meeting options, and as of
right now, ICRS is not officially supporting them. Nonetheless, we look
forward to organizing them and paving the way for regional meetings to
become an official part of ICRS and other conferences.

It is undeniable that our actions and our words matter. Greta's journey
across the Atlantic caught the public's attention and has prompted
conversations across the globe about choosing to fly less. Hundreds or
thousands of coral reef scientists not buying plane tickets and talking
about these decisions to their friends, family, and local media will have
an impact. *Our decisions have impacts whether we choose to recognize them
or not. How can we expect the world to listen to scientists, and for other
people to care about lowering their carbon footprint through rapid
unprecedented changes, if we are not willing to make sacrifices to lower
our emissions? *My job offered to send me to ICRS 2020 in Bremen. I am an
early career scientist with a lot to gain from networking, and I have new
research results that I am excited to share with the coral reef community.
My concern over the climate crisis combined with the enormous CO2 emissions
required to fly from Hawaii and Germany is the reason that I am not going.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190909-why-flight-shame-is-making-people-swap-planes-for-trains
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02656-8?fbclid=IwAR2KQFoOSOCxXCrDeURZoX1BqtIdF_xGs6qpxjUfqvEBz0TC444S0IaDsGg

The thinking that got us into this mess of climate change and biodiversity
loss will not get us out of it. *Yes, to save the reefs, we can not
regularly fly to reefs or fly to give talks the way we have grown
accustomed to. Our numerous trips to survey coral reefs are contributing to
the global loss of reefs. There are options to shift the paradigm. Coral
reef scientists can choose to live next to the reefs they study. Or
scientists can plan low CO2 emissions expeditions using sailboats or other
travel options that don't rely on jet fuel. Or, perhaps the best option,
scientists can train and empower local community members of island nations
to collect data and run experiments for them. *I know this is much less
exciting than jet-setting around the world, but the climate crisis is
here. Right
now the reefs in Hawaii are bleaching. For the third time this decade we
are approaching what is predicted to be a major bleaching event. We need to
think about any and all action that we can take to slow it down and shift
societal norms. As Greta would say, "I want you to act like your house is
on fire, because it is."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-world/?fbclid=IwAR3g-KVbdudBnGhp8RQhcTST726tiTUJYAnDuYaLqIIKb_WmjTiRZ_P7UBU

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Hawaiis-Warmest-Summer-Record-and-Alaskas-Second-Warmest?fbclid=IwAR1A0GU5MJBllmWD8sdaYC-Cx0hwi9SjnSkfjhZUpszchTTIJv_n1AnogfU

-- 
Chelsie Counsell, Ph.D.
Quantitative Community Ecologist
Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology
chelsiew12 at gmail.com