Environmental impact

The GRAND collaboration is committed to environmental awareness. GRAND members will endeavor to continually improve their environmental performance as an integral part of the development and operating procedures of the GRAND experiment.

The Green Policy discussed at the 2021 Collaboration meeting was voted and approved by the core-team meeting on January 21, 2022. It outlines a set of guidelines which the GRAND Collaboration promotes and commits to follow to the best of its capabilities.

The GRAND green policy can be downloaded here GRAND_Green_Policy_signed.

As the experiment is in its prototyping stage, the time is ripe to take decisions according to environmental criteria. A first step towards taking such measures was to estimate the carbon footprint of the experiment, and assess the major sources of emission. A pioneering study of the global carbon footprint assessment of the GRAND experiment was conducted by Clarisse Aujoux (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, ENSTA), Kumiko Kotera (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris), and Odile Blanchard (Université Grenoble Alpes). The study was published in Astroparticle Physics, and broadened to be published in Nature.

Check our news on the subject here.

A study has also been undertaken to assess the environmental impact of the installation and use of the Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND) prototype detection units, based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, and to propose recommendations that contribute to reduce the environmental impacts of the project at later stages. A publication in Astroparticle Physics will be released soon.

The full Excel sheet containing the Inventory and all the details to make the analysis reproductible is available here.