A message from the Director-General

CERN was established in 1954 as a focal point for fundamental physics research in Europe, providing facilities that are beyond the reach of individual countries and fostering cooperation between European states through science. Today, the Laboratory has grown to provide a unique set of research infrastructures serving a worldwide community of scientists and has become a model of global collaboration. CERN also aspires to be a model for a sustainable and environment-friendly research organisation and to ensure that some of its technologies can help society to protect the planet.

Over recent years, climate and environment awareness has grown considerably. While CERN has always taken its environmental stewardship seriously, today we are making extra efforts to ensure that we can deliver all our objectives with minimum environmental impact while making a maximum contribution to society. This applies both to potential future facilities and to existing ones.

In 2020, the European particle physics community published an update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics and recommended that CERN carry out a feasibility study for a Future Circular Collider (FCC). It also recommended that “A detailed plan for the minimisation of environmental impact and for the saving and re-use of energy should be part of the approval process for any major project”. In other words, sustainability will be built into any future project at CERN.

For that reason, the FCC feasibility study team is looking closely at the environmental feasibility of the FCC, examining aspects ranging from the preservation of biodiversity to the use of excavated materials, developing more energy-efficient technologies and deploying renewable energy solutions. We will keep you fully informed of developments in this area in future reports.

Today, climate change and protecting the environment are among the greatest challenges that humanity faces. It is incumbent on all of us to play our part in mitigating the impact of human activity on it. Business as usual is not an option, and we at CERN are actively investigating how we can continue to advance the frontiers of human knowledge while minimising the environmental footprint of our facilities and being a positive contributor of solutions.

Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General

A message from the Head of the Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Protection unit

CERN’s third Environment Report covers the years 2021 and 2022, a period that was marked by the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of war in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both have had an impact on the data you will find in this report. Like most of the world, COVID-19 has changed the way in which CERN operates. Although the Laboratory has come back to life with people physically returning to the workplace, many now take advantage of the new possibility to telework part time and the amount of travel has significantly decreased. The result of this is clearly visible in our commuting and travel statistics and the accompanying environmental data. The Russian invasion contributed to volatility in the energy markets. Consequently, CERN has implemented additional energy-saving measures as a mark of social responsibility.

For a large part of this reporting period, CERN’s accelerator complex was undergoing a long shutdown for maintenance and upgrades. CERN’s environmental footprint during a long shutdown is markedly different to what it is in a period of accelerator operation. Our energy and water consumption are lower, for example, but our waste treatment rate is higher as we replace worn out and obsolete equipment.

Despite the challenging backdrop of the continuing pandemic, the shutdown objectives were all accomplished, and the accelerators progressively came back to life in 2021-2022, culminating in the successful restart of CERN’s flagship project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in July 2022. The work carried out during the shutdown was designed to improve the performance of the accelerators and detectors and to improve their environmental credentials. The accelerator complex is now more efficient, delivering more data per unit of energy consumed. The experiments invested much effort in repairing leaks in their gas systems and worked towards replacing the current gases with more environmentally friendly ones.

This report also covers the new CERN Innovation Programme on Environmental Applications (CIPEA), which was launched in March 2022 and is funding its first eight projects. We include, for the first time, data on the scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions arising from procurement. Over the years since we embarked on our first environment report, we have learned a great deal about our footprint, implemented mechanisms to better understand and control it and increased our efforts to identify and develop technologies stemming from our core research that have the potential to benefit the environment. Although there is still some way to go, we have made considerable progress, which I encourage you to explore in this report.

Benoît Delille, Head of the Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Protection unit

This reporting period saw the completion of the second long shutdown and the restart of the accelerator complex (Run 3) with a view to reaching the new collision energy of 13.6 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In some domains environmental indicators may be very different during shutdown years compared to operation years, so they are shown for both years to highlight this, where relevant. 2022 indicators are prominently shown for those domains where priority objectives have been defined, namely Energy, Emissions and Water and Effluents.

Explore the report online or download it as a PDF.

Questions regarding this report may be addressed to environment.report@cern.ch.