The warming stripes by Prof. Ed Hawkins (U. of Reading) illustrate worldwide increase in temperature since 1850.


Robots and roboticists in the age of climate change - Act II

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the overall emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activities must decrease at a rapid pace. This includes emissions due to robotics, whether they come from the applications unlocked by robotics technologies or from the underlying activities of the research community. While climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, it is seldom discussed within the Robotics and Automation Society. This workshop builds on our first workshop organized at ICRA2024 to deepen the discussion through a mix of presentations aimed to educate on the issue and direct participant interactions to build a sustained longer-term reflection on how robotics research and its outcomes could evolve to contribute to greenhouse gases emission decrease. This will include a general presentation of climate change, a presentation of the audit mandated by the RAS AdHoc committee on sustainability of the impact of RAS activities on the climate, a guided computation for each participant of their individual and laboratory footprint to give a more concrete example of the order of magnitudes regarding emissions, and an open discussion on the possible ways to improve the footprint of robotics activities. External speakers experts on climate change will be invited and interactions between participants will be a central part to the workshop.

Content of the workshop

Our planet is currently undergoing a change of its climate with a rapid increase of its global mean surface temperature (GMST) due to an additional greenhouse effect resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) by human activities. This observation was unequivocally reiterated by the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the intergovernmental body of the United Nations (UN) tasked to summarize the scientific knowledge about climate change. This report also provides projections on the consequences of different GMST increases in terms of food availability, region habitability, sea level rise or extreme weather occurrence, and other impacts on nature and human civilizations.

To avoid the direct consequences of climate change and uncontrollable positive feedback loops, the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 by 196 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) with the goal to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and try “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” Yet, even avoiding to exceed an increase of 2°C requires to decrease GHG emissions by 5% per year, an important effort as such a decrease was seen only twice in the industrial era: in 1945, last year of World War 2 and in 2020, first year of the COVID 19 pandemics. This decrease concerns all GHG emissions, and that includes those due to robotic activities.

While this pressing issue is global and therefore concerns everyone, it is seldom addressed in the robotics community. Last year, we initiated the discussion with a workshop at ICRA24 which in particular welcomed Kaoru Tachiiri, a Senior Scientist and a Group Leader of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and a contributing author in the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Working Group (WG) 1 of IPCC to give the keynote address. The discussion initiated was very fruitful and we aim to continue it at ICRA 2025. The goal of this workshop is to continue the discussion on how robotics can take its share in the decrease of GHG emissions, looking both at the impact of robotic research activities and the (positive and negative) impacts of robot deployments in real applications. We especially aim to continue to reach a larger audience and to start proposing concrete actions for our community.

Given the transverse nature of the subject, we expect to gather participants from all areas of robotics and we will again invite recognized experts on climate change. While the subject of climate change is not discussed much in the robotic community, it is the organizers’ experience, through presentations and discussions at national conferences, and last year’s workshop feedback from about 50 participants, that there is a large desire for addressing the topic, especially among, but definitely not limited to, younger researchers.


Tentative Schedule (1/2 days workshop)

Organizers