  Research institutions are bound to contribute to greenhouse gas emission
(GHG) reduction efforts for several reasons. First, part of the scientific
community's research deals with climate change issues. Second, scientists
contribute to students' education: they must be consistent and role models.
Third the literature on the carbon footprint of researchers points to the high
level of some individual footprints. In a quest for consistency and role
models, scientists, teams of scientists or universities have started to
quantify their carbon footprints and debate on reduction options. Indeed,
measuring the carbon footprint of research activities requires tools designed
to tackle its specific features. In this paper, we present an open-source web
application, GES 1point5, developed by an interdisciplinary team of scientists
from several research labs in France. GES 1point5 is specifically designed to
estimate the carbon footprint of research activities in France. It operates at
the scale of research labs, i.e. laboratoires, which are the social structures
around which research is organized in France and the smallest decision making
entities in the French research system. The application allows French research
labs to compute their own carbon footprint along a standardized, open protocol.
The data collected in a rapidly growing network of labs will be used as part of
the Labos 1point5 project to estimate France's research carbon footprint. At
the time of submitting this manuscript, 89 research labs had engaged with GES
1point5 to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions. We expect that an
international adoption of GES 1point5 (adapted to fit domestic specifics) could
contribute to establishing a global understanding of the drivers of the
research carbon footprint worldwide and the levers to decrease it.
