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Olukunle Charles Olawole Department of Physics Covenant University 

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Olukunle Charles Olawole Department of Physics Covenant University 

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In recent times, academics' hypermobility is joining the agent of world global warming. These researchers engage in this act due to collaborations, presentations, communications of their findings among colleagues, promotion criteria, global relevance, and inter-multidisciplinary research (Langenbrunner et al., 2019). However, the harm this aero mobility does to the environment outweighs its benefits. It has been observed that an aircraft engine can burn 1 kg of fuel to give an emission of 3.16 kg of CO₂ and 1.23 kg of H₂O (Lee et al., 2021). No wonder the earth's temperature has risen to 1.21 (± 0.13)⁰C (Global Temperature Report, 2021). Also, the finding shows that this may adversely affect global food production, water security and human health. In addition, literature revealed that the academics from North America, Europe, Amentia, Australia, and China have the highest carbon footprint. In mitigating the greenhouse gases of academics’ hyper-mobility, universities should install state-of-art ICT facilities that promote world-class video conferencing in any academic events. Also, each university should make a law that prohibits faculty from travelling not more than once in an academic year. In addition, more incentives should be given to academics who engage in video conferencing. A paradigm shift from air travel to train, direct flight for an indirect trip and economy class for business and the first-class trip should be adopted (Clers et al., 2018).

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Academics, researchers, and members of the public who do not fly or fly less.

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We are scientists, academics, and members of the public who either don't fly or who fly less.

We feel that global warming poses a clear, present, and dire danger for humanity. In an era of obvious climate change, we feel a need to ramp down unnecessary fossil fuel use. Actions speak louder than words.

We try to fly as little as possible while pushing for systemic change, especially through our home institutions. These are our stories: why we fly less, and what that means in a society that still, insanely, rewards frequent flying.

Why the focus on flying? Hour for hour, there's no better way to burn fossil fuel and heat the planet. Flying is also the domain of the globally privileged, and perhaps the most important example of lifestyle change we'll all need to accept, sooner or later, as we transition away from fossil fuel: there's no feasible replacement for fossil-fueled long-haul aviation at its current scale.

We especially encourage stories from academics. While COVID has shifted social expectations around academic flying, the pressure to attend conferences, workshops, and meetings in person is once again ramping up. And as institutions, colleges and universities ostensibly exist to make a better future, especially for young people. But every mile flown, and every dollar spent in support of the fossil fuel industry, increases climate breakdown and the risk of locking in a catastrophic collective future.

We hope that our openness about flying less helps to change flying culture, gradually reducing the professional handicap for those of us who choose to align our personal actions with our knowledge of global heating. We urge academic institutions to realize their responsibility to be role models in an age of obvious climate breakdown, and therefore to adopt policies and strategies for flying less.

We also hope to increase awareness of the climate impact of frequent flying outside of the scientific community. Flying currently accounts for less than 5% of global climate impact, but it typically dominates the emission profiles of the globally privileged people who can afford it.

Each member speaks on his or her own behalf. Joining this site does not constitute a pledge not to fly.

The site was started and is maintained by a climate scientist, Peter Kalmus, from a simple desire for a livable planet for all. more about the site, and contact info

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We are scientists, academics, and members of the public who either don't fly or who fly less. We feel that global warming poses a clear, present, and dire danger for humanity. In an era of obvious climate change, we feel a need to ramp down unnecessary fossil fuel use.

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VXeY4uPQ0xvgkfuMUX1OI62zNNt84pWF/view

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ETH Zurich's air travel project "Stay grounded, keep connected"

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ETH Zurich's air travel project "Stay grounded, keep connected"

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Offers a lot of info and material:
https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/sustainability/context/air-travel.html

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Quantifying aviation's contribution to global warming.

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Quantifying aviation's contribution to global warming.

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M Klöwer et al 2021. Environ. Res. Lett. 16 104027
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac286e

How does flying impact the climate? How does flying less reduce aviation's footprint?

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Really great to meet so many like-minded people! My email is julia.barrott@sei.org if anyone wants to continue the conversation or find out more about the TR2AIL tool - 

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Really great to meet so many like-minded people! My email is julia.barrott@sei.org if anyone wants to continue the conversation or find out more about the TR2AIL tool - 

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Greenhouse gas emissions from flight-intensive organisations' air travel are substantial. Even with an increasing willingness to change, especially from management, decisions on when, where and how to travel are often made at the individual employee level. At this level, there is often an incomplete awareness of the impacts of air travel, a perceived lack of alternative options, and a lack of support mechanisms to inform decisions on if and how to travel. Understanding individual travel behaviour and ensuring that interventions appropriately target the decision maker at the point of decision is essential to effectively minimize impacts from air travel.

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Greenhouse gas emissions from flight-intensive organisations' air travel are substantial. Even with an increasing willingness to change, especially from management, decisions on when, where and how to travel are often made at the individual employee level.

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http://danielpargman.blogspot.com/2022/03/reduced-emissions-from-business-travel.html).

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Choosing a flight free PhD, LSE blog post, Agnes Kreil, Sara Ullström

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Choosing a flight free PhD, LSE blog post, Agnes Kreil, Sara Ullström

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https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/03/11/choosing-a-flight-free-phd-3-strategies-for-successful-grounded-doctoral-study/

Agnes Kreil,
Sara Ullström

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An analysis of decarbonising conference travel after COVID-19

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An analysis of decarbonising conference travel after COVID-19

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Nature 583, 356-359 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02057-2

How the carbon footprint of conferences changes with location, regional hubs, more train journeys and increased virtual participation.

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Exploring the problem space of CO2 emission reductions from academic flying. 

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Exploring the problem space of CO2 emission reductions from academic flying. 

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Biørn-Hansen, A., Pargman, D., Eriksson, E., Romero, M., Laaksolahti, J., & Robért, M. (2021).

Sustainability, 13(21), 12206.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su132112206

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Making and Meeting Online: A White Paper on E-Conferences, Workshops, and other Experiments in Low-Carbon Research Exchange

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Making and Meeting Online: A White Paper on E-Conferences, Workshops, and other Experiments in Low-Carbon Research Exchange

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An early pandemic whitepaper on e-conferences, with some thoughts given to social protocols and design considerations that might be useful

Authors: Anne Pasek, Caleb Wellum, and Emily Roehl

https://www.energyhumanities.ca/news/making-and-meeting-online

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Green Book (on Student Mobility) - CIS Australia

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Green Book (on Student Mobility) - CIS Australia

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https://www.cisaustralia.com.au/why-cisaustralia/environmental-sustainability/

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https://www.sustainabilityexchange.ac.uk/travel_better_package

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The Travel Better Package aims to support the reduction of air travel in the FHE sector, specifically amongst academics and staff. It also aims to support reflection on and reconfiguration of the FHE sector's relationship to air travel on an institutional and individual basis. Lastly, it hopes to encourage individuals to travel better, meaning, to be more knowledgeable about sustainable travel, actively choose sustainable travel options and encourage others to do the same, and create opportunities that would reduce air travel and advance sustainable travel. The package is also concerned with improving equity and diversity while reducing air travel in the sector and offers support in doing this.

The Travel Better Package includes

A Questions & Answer tool addressing concerns individuals may have about reducing air travel

The Travel Better Pledge Template used to inform individual behaviour change, as well as departmental and/or institutional policies, pledges and statements

The Air Travel Justification Tool, which is an extension of a decision tree - the tool supports individuals in justifying/reflecting on attending a conference, meeting and/or event that is only accessible through flying

This is the first version of the Travel Better Package. The resources are subject to change and updates.

A recording of the webinar introducing the Package can be found here.

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The Travel Better Package aims to support the reduction of air travel in the FHE sector, specifically amongst academics and staff. It also aims to support reflection on and reconfiguration of the FHE sector's relationship to air travel on an institutional and individual basis.

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"We’ll showcase the best examples of academics leading their institutions into the future..." https://facultyforafuture.org/institutional-change

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Forging a path to a better normal for conferences and collaboration - Moss et al 2021

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Forging a path to a better normal for conferences and collaboration - Moss et al 2021

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Moss, V.A., Adcock, M., Hotan, A.W. et al.
Nat Astron 5, 213–216 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01325-z

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Members of The Future of Meetings Organising Committee gathering in the virtual TFOM space, hosted in the social virtual reality platform AltspaceVR.

Benefits and challenges of the virtual format

There are many benefits that arise when adopting a virtual format instead of the in-person equivalent. In-person conferences typically have many barriers that create disadvantages in terms of accessibility. Access to funding, personal commitments, caring duties, health, ability to freely travel, mobility, disability, sustainability concerns - these factors among others have meant that our academic conferences have always been, often to a significant extent, inaccessible. We have had centuries to 'perfect' the art of meeting in person, and arguably such meetings are far from perfect. Perhaps the greatest advantage of a virtual format is the 'levelling of the playing field' across these many barriers to in-person, such that it is possible to create far more accessible and inclusive virtual forums. Critically, virtual meetings enable us to do significantly less harm to the environment as the need to reduce climate impact at all scales increases drastically; we calculated that TFOM produced 1,420 kg of CO ₂ equivalent (which we offset in entirety via planting trees), while the in-person equivalent would have produced upwards of 280,000 kg of CO ₂ equivalent. It also costs much less to both organize and attend virtual events and enables communication more broadly than ever before.

Another key advantage of the virtual format is the potential persistence and legacy of content. With virtual meetings, as well as standard content preservation, we can readily save discussions and have digitally delivered talks instantly available for viewing by those in different time zones or those who wish to engage with the content asynchronously. A digital format enables rapidly improving accessibility tools like automatic captioning and transcribing to be incorporated, increasing ease of participation. Digital collaborative tools like virtual whiteboards facilitate the reproduction and capture of brainstorming efforts, sometimes more effectively and equitably than in-person. Online archives can be produced from conferences and collaborations that, if supplemented by ways to connect and communicate, can result in conversations that stretch well beyond the boundaries of any given meeting or conference. An additional and serious consideration is the safety and confidence of junior researchers given the incidence of inappropriate interactions and sexual harassment at academic conferences, in that virtual should allow them to connect safely from an environment that they are comfortable with.

Virtual environments, as we all know, do not come without challenges. The issue of attention span has been raised repeatedly due to many conferences porting their in-person programme directly to an online format, sometimes including a large number of parallel sessions. Most now acknowledge that the expectation of dialling into a video call for several hours is unacceptable, and yet this has been our standard in-person conference approach. There can be a coldness to the virtual format; it is sometimes hard to feel the same sense of community as when everyone is in a room together, able to make direct eye contact and detect subtle body language. Social bonds and networking have been harder to realize in a virtual space, which has particular importance for the junior members of the academic community since a personal interaction may affect their future career. Extroverts can be especially affected by the lack of in-person contact, though introverts may prefer the virtual format. Time zones present an undeniable obstacle in terms of bringing an international community together. Presence at a virtual meeting or conference often assumes that attendees have reliable access to suitable technologies and internet connections, which can be particularly challenging for those connecting from remote or developing areas.

These challenges are all real, but not insurmountable, nor do they outweigh the benefits gained by adopting a virtual format. It requires us to give deep thought to the concept of why we want or need to meet at all, and to disconnect from two key assumptions: firstly, that what we would do in-person is what we should do virtually, and secondly, that our standards for in-person were ever best practice to begin with. Live group attendance should be restricted to situations where it is most effective or necessary, and activities that can be done in a collaborative offline setting can supplement the need for lengthy online sessions. Breaks between content or meetings should be frequent, and in the case of conferences, should alternate between encouraging virtual social connection and giving attendees necessary downtime away from screens. Virtual community building takes effort, similar to building an in-person community, and this requires effort, invested by organizers, to encourage conversation and connection between attendees if this is an important goal, with particular awareness of how to maximize the benefits of such sessions for junior or less-connected members of a given community. Various technologies already exist that can take us beyond the standard 'Brady Bunch' video call format, including spatial audio/visual platforms, desktop-based virtual environments and immersive virtual/augmented reality platforms. Any given technology tool might work for one context but not another, which is why it is important to experiment and consider carefully the end goal of any interaction in choosing the appropriate solution. It is also possible to find ways to have shared meals/experiences/team building online, though these kinds of virtual social activities are really still in their infancy. For a comprehensive list of possible digital tools that may meet the needs described above, we refer readers to the 'Resources' section (XI) of the TFOM report.

While the reality of a round planet will never go away, overcoming the challenge of time zones essentially depends on what absolutely needs to take place live and determining what can be done using collaborative online discussion tools. Finally, if technology access of attendees is a consideration, the platforms used for virtual meetings should not rely on live high-bandwidth connections. Generally, opting for platforms that adapt according to internet connections and operating systems is preferable. Making video content available in a recorded form before or immediately after an event can also be a helpful solution for low-bandwidth connections, additionally benefiting others for whom live attendance was not possible or preferable.

What does the future look like?

We propose that the primary goal of future conference organization should be that attendees have equivalent agency regardless of location. Coming out of 2020, we have seen many claims that hybrid will be the way of future meetings. We contend this is only viable and fair if these meetings are designed to be digital-first. By digital-first, we mean prioritizing the digital means of communication above all other ways of connecting even if there is an in-person component to the event. We first consider why the current hybrid model is fundamentally flawed compared to a digital-first approach.

The most common conception of a hybrid event is in-person with a remote connection. In the case of conferences and meetings, this typically manifests as a focus on the in-person event with the ability for speakers or attendees to connect to a virtual stream and these remote attendees are often invisible to physical participants. This approach does offer some advantages, namely allowing the richness of in-person interaction for those physically present, enabling broader access beyond the physical room and lowering environmental impact to some degree. However, there are significant drawbacks to this approach that limit its effectiveness and make it hard to recommend as best practice. The addition of a virtual option is usually considered a backup solution for those who cannot attend in person (which may be for personal reasons or disabilities), which often cements inequity and creates two classes of attendee. The environmental impact of hybrid remains high compared to purely digital (since people who can travel typically will). Additionally, this form of hybrid only has a chance of succeeding if the balance between in-person and virtual attendees is tipped in favour of the virtual. It is also not widely acknowledged that a hybrid event essentially doubles the workload for organizers, and in the case of hubs, requires geographically distributed yet well-synchronized organizational effort.

Can we design a better form of hybrid? Groups around the world have investigated and defined different models (see, for example, refs. ), while many contemporary conferences and meetings are empirically exploring the hybrid parameter space. Conversely, Trello and its now-parent company Atlassian have adopted a policy of 'all in the room or all virtual' to prevent inequalities in attendance. In fact, many of these discussions and considerations can be traced back to early research into digital collaboration, where it was concluded that much of our problem with using digital means to reproduce face-to-face communication is the assumption that face-to-face is all we really need from virtual communication. Ultimately, we advocate that digital-first mechanisms will be the binding element that holds future interactions together. Hybrid may then be a viable solution, if implemented by adopting a digital-first mindset in the design and execution of collaborative interactions.

The importance of architecting digital events

In terms of our role in organizing TFOM, we consciously identified, discussed and optimized every element of the symposium, which required considerable but worthwhile effort. In post-TFOM discussions, the related concept of a 'digital-meeting architect' was suggested as a role that may be needed in the future to ensure maximum success for virtual interactions of various kinds. This would be an organizational role, with focus on design and execution of the virtual nature of an event, and would help to address circumstances where virtual events fall short of expectation not due to intrinsic challenges but because they are missing the appropriate level of oversight and coordination by organizers.

Thinking of virtual interactions in the sense of an architecture captures some of the notion of actively and carefully constructing an effective event. Goal-oriented design and implementation of a virtual event takes effort, and while it will almost certainly be much cheaper than the in-person equivalent, it is by no means less work for organizers. It also highlights that we should be thinking of our virtual venues with the same attention to detail and desire for aesthetics as our physical venues. They should be aesthetically pleasing places to exist within, not simply focused on practicality or technical performance. While already relevant in terms of digital tools and media in common use, this aspect will soon have even more relevance as augmented and virtual reality technologies become increasingly prevalent in the workplace.

In the end, a successful virtual interaction is not dependent on any one factor, but on the sum of many parts that should be defined based on context and goals. While aspects of the interaction may be effectively outsourced (for example, video streaming management, recorded video editing and website design), there remains a necessity for everything to be coordinated carefully based on an overarching vision. For large events, this coordination has traditionally been provided by event management companies in close consultation with organizers, and there are trends towards this as a viable path for larger virtual interactions as event companies pivot to support digital more effectively. However, at this point in time we are finding the majority of conference organization companies do not yet have extensive 'digital architecture' expertise, which can result in large investment for suboptimal outcomes.

In our experience we found that virtual settings can be a great leveller in terms of required resources, and we believe that organizers themselves can (and should) take more direct ownership of events and conferences, likely reducing the required budget considerably for even large-scale events and meetings. Regardless of exactly who takes responsibility, a successful virtual event requires approaching the construction of the interaction with the right mindset. Thus, our key message on this topic of digital meeting architecture is that virtual can work extremely well, but only if you plan ahead and build the event appropriately for the virtual context.

Recommendations and next steps

The intense period of disruption brought in by the global pandemic has given us an opportunity to reassess and redefine the ways in which we collaborate. As we contemplate a transition out of this disruptive era, it will be critical to avoid the temptation to dismiss 2020 as the sum of its worst parts without seeing the good that came out of it. While we are still exploring how best to be digital natives, we have seen tremendous progress in virtual communication and collaboration over the last few decades. To have come this far at remote collaboration in such a short time is incredible, and hints at some of the amazing things yet to come.

When we concluded TFOM, we urged our attendees to see this challenging period as one of learning, so that we can build the kind of future we want to be part of. Our collective experience in 2020 showed us the flaws in our approach to scientific collaboration, and bound us to innovative, more effective, accessible and sustainable ways of connecting. The questions to ask ourselves now, at the boundary between the present and the future, are what should we be doing next, and what changes can we make to build on the current situation for a better 'normal'? Should we return to face-to-face meetings and try to recover what we feel was lost during this disruptive period, without acknowledging the many benefits that we have gained from meeting virtually? Or is it worth forging ahead, along new pathways, with the recognition it will lead to discovering (sometimes the hard way) how to be better?

In the spirit of Tomfoolery's Great Realisation: "And so when we found the cure, and were allowed to go outside, we all preferred the world we found to the one we'd left behind."

Now is our chance to choose the accessible, the inclusive, the sustainable, the 'new normal' - not because it will be easy, but because it will lead to a better future.

Acknowledgements

We thank P. Edwards, R. Ekers and E. Kerrison for feedback on this Comment that helped to improve its content.

Author information

Affiliations

1. CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science, Epping, New South Wales, Australia

Vanessa A. Moss

2. Sydney Institute for Astronomy, School of Physics, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Vanessa A. Moss

3. CSIRO Data61, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Matt Adcock

4. CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science, Bentley, Western Australia, Australia

Aidan W. Hotan & Chenoa D. Tremblay

5. ANU Supercomputer Facility, Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Rika Kobayashi

6. BEBR, Groningen, the Netherlands

Glen A. Rees

7. CSIRO Mineral Resources, Bentley, Western Australia, Australia

Coralie Siégel

8. CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

Claire E. Trenham

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Vanessa A. Moss.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Moss, V.A., Adcock, M., Hotan, A.W. et al. Forging a path to a better normal for conferences and collaboration. Nat Astron 5, 213-216 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01325-z
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Further reading

Leonard Burtscher

Hannah Dalgleish

Michelle Willebrands

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Yanqiu Tao

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Topics in Current Chemistry (2021)

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Forging a path to a better normal for conferences and collaboration - Nature Astronomy

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The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced a string of cancelled conferences, causing many organizers to shift meetings online, with mixed success. Seizing the opportunity, a group of researchers came together to rethink how the conference experience and collaboration in general can be improved in a more virtual-centric future.

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8343395/

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https://hiltner.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/ncnc-guide/

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Materialising the CO2 emissions from business air travel at KTH. 

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Materialising CO2 emissions and the inequality of flying (KTH)

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Materialising CO2 emissions and the inequality of flying (KTH)

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Touching upon both the justice / equity aspects of flying as well as its meaning and measurement of its impact, we have in the FLIGHT project at KTH experimented with materialising emissions from different divisions (organisational group of 20-50 ppl) using poker chips. Using data on all employee flights, we have assigned the poker chips value, either as a one-way trip or CO2 emissions. The aim with doing this has been to materialise and visualize the flying of a division at workshops with employees at particular divisions in order to facilitate difficult conversations about what that needs to be done in order to reduce emissions and reach agreed upon goals.

In the image you can see an example of this approach, where we have laid out two boards representing the same division, 21 employees, with the poker chips assigned the value of number of one-way trips (right) or CO2 emissions per trip (left). Each square on the board is one anonymous employee, with the green being Senior Faculty and the yellow Junior Faculty. As can be seen, the distribution of trips and CO2 emissions is very unequally distributed amongst the employees, with only a few, senior faculty, standing for the majority of emissions at the division (left side of the image).

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Paper: The carbon footprint of a knowledge organization and emission scenarios for a post-COVID-19 world

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Paper: The carbon footprint of a knowledge organization and emission scenarios for a post-COVID-19 world

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2021.106645

Summary:

The carbon footprint of a multinational knowledge organization was measured.

The carbon footprint consisted mainly of Scope 3 and travel related emissions.

Three scenarios for a post-COVID-19 world were developed and analyzed.

Concrete examples of how to avoid and reduce emissions are presented.

New forms of carbon offsetting e.g. internal offsets are discussed.

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Of course we as academics, and doubly so since we work in environmental topic areas, should lead by example and use air travel for work less.
However, though the latest pandemic has demonstrated how much we can achieve through remote contact we we need to, it has also shown us the value of social contact. In addition, in the face of health risks, we have managed to set to zero huge recent efforts in reducing waste/packaging C-losses. The 2-year restrictions are also resulting in something of a revival in airtraffic for holidaying.
Perhaps our aim should be to reduce our air travel (of course) to more targeted value options and to increase our use of conference destinations which allow overland travel (a challenge admittedly for island nations!)?
Eliminating/reducing business/elite class for medium duration flights and the use of business jets (governments) would probably make a far greater contribution to reducing plane emissions than academic conference travel restrictions etc.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-01216-9

(included a number of articles focusing on climate change and astronomy practice)

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Group 3 - Daniel Pargman (KTH). We have the data

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Group 3 - Daniel Pargman (KTH). We have the data

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The image that Ben paints above goes a long way to describing the situation also at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm).

We are however fortunate in that our university and many other Swedish universities have signed the "impossibly ambitious" (Paris Agreement-compliant) "Climate Framework" for Higher education institutions in Sweden. So we don't have to tell (convince, preach, cajole) researchers (or our president) what we need to do, we just have to point at what we have already committed to do. Of course, there is a huge difference between goals, ambitions and wistful-but-unrealistic "hopes", but at least the goal conflicts now come to the fore - and we can discuss and confront them "rationally"(?).

We have oodles of data (including HR data), but we have also developed a workshop format and "material visualizations" that allows us to present a department with their CO2 emissions (e.g. collective + individual (anonymized) emissions from each employee). Confronting people with their emissions can create... strong feelings. And interesting discussions.

We have also played around with our data and I currently supervise students who work on finding "KTH's fastest professors" (most flight miles divided by total # of days away from Sweden). Another side project of ours (not yet published) calculated the "Monetary Carbon Intensity" of research grants from different funding agencies (e.g. CO2/MSEK in funding). We also make our students work for us (writing bachelor's and master's theses). Two students are currently designing an interactive artistic "installation" that displays the stark inequalities of CO2 emissions from flying at KTH (GINI coefficient, the 80/20 rule etc.)

Resources:
- Climate Framework for Swedish HEIs
Pargman, Laaksolahti, Eriksson, Robèrt & Biørn-Hansen, "Who gets to fly?". In "Academic Flying and the Means of Communication". Pdf.

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Reduced emissions from business travel (new research grant application)

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Reduced emissions from business travel (new research grant application)

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We handed in a new research grant application only last week, "Reduced emissions from business travel: Joint efforts to achieve Swedish universities’ climate goals".

If granted, the research project would run between 2023 and 2014 and we have no less than 18 partners:
- The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency
- The Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions
- 16 partnering Swedish Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

We think the project has the potential to help Swedish HEIs lead the (necessary) transition to a sleeker future-proofed low-flying/low-emitting Academy. We also hope the project results could serve as inspiration for universities abroad as well as for other Swedish governmental agencies and flight-intensive organizations in general. The team behind the application all work at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden):
- Daniel Pargman
- Markus Robèrt
- Elina Eriksson
- Jarmo Laaksolahti
- Aksel Biørn-Hansen

Read more at: http://danielpargman.blogspot.com/2022/03/reduced-emissions-from-business-travel.html

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Mimi Sheller (WPI) on Aero-Mobility (in)justice

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Mimi Sheller (WPI) on Aero-Mobility (in)justice

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I absolutely agree with @VeronicaAhonen who says "we must approach reductions from a perspective of mobility justice (and injustice)" and see @BenAnderson on the 80:20 kinetic elite. To expand on these points and elaborate various elements of justice in these policies:
1. Senior academics who have already benefited from a career of traveling should have the strictest carbon cap, and also will have the greatest capacity to join events remotely due to their existing recognition (procedural justice allows them to still join academic conversation and exchange).
2. Kinetic elites who consume the largest carbon budget (more travel, more flights, business or first class travel, longer distance) should also have the strictest carbon cap FOR NOW at least until we can collectively bring emissions down (short term sacrifice necessary for reparative justice to make up for past harm).
3. Institutions (usually elite) that have the highest carbon footprints should have the highest caps on emissions, while those at the lower end of the scale should have more room for growth and should be included in decision-making processes about this (deliberative justice ensured).
4. Young people who have not flown much, early career academics, and scholars from the Global South and other less advantaged places should have larger carbon budgets to allow for some benefits of air travel (distributive justice to those who have had the least).
5. Wherever possible all travel should be shifted to lower-emissions modes (obviously) and less high-speed travel, which also entails shifting the paradigm of internationalization of education and valuing local meetings, multiple languages, diversity of knowledge production, and visiting places for longer, slower exchanges (epistemic justice).

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Books on Academic Aeromobility (open access)

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Books on Academic Aeromobility (open access)

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https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-4911-0

Academic Flying and the Means of Communication

Editors

Kristian Bjørkdahl

Adrian Santiago Franco Duharte

Provides the first and only volume to collect and consolidate current research on academic aeromobility

Uncovers the mechanisms that have made flying seem necessary to the academic enterprise

Offers research-based proposals for how to reduce academia’s reliance on flying

Reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed or might change attitudes towards air travel

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in addition to the good points already posted, I might add that there are other significant costs of travelling on our time in addition to the financial and carbon emissions. The organisation of travel is time-consuming, the panic to clear our desk of urgent matters before we travel, the backlog of work accumulated upon our return, the personal/family time lost while travelling, the exhaustion this entails, compounded by jet lag means we are less productive on our return. I lived in New Zealand for 16 years. Almost every business trip took 2 days each way.  Perhaps we should have guidelines that if travelling takes longer than the meeting we should not attend? That employers consider the trip takes time away from what might be more productive work?
[Mark Costello, Nord University, Norway]

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Aksel Biørn-Hansen et al (2021) Exploring the Problem Space of CO2 Emission Reductions from Academic Flying

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Aksel Biørn-Hansen et al (2021) Exploring the Problem Space of CO2 Emission Reductions from Academic Flying

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This is a paper we wrote recently on the problem space of reducing CO2 emissions from flying at our own university, KTH Royal University in Stockholm Sweden. It discusses et challenge of collecting data on air travel, how and at what level to visualize data, ethical aspects of flight data, and much more!

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[Participant contribution to the online workshop Academic aeromobility in a post-pandemic future organised by the Tyndall Centre, Manchester, 22 March 2022. This is a lightly edited version of an email response to a colleague who, reviewing the possibilities for "flying less", asked me to "... sketch out the issues re aviation emissions compared to other transport forms or to point me to some literature that would be helpful." What follows is my fairly unstructured brain dump...]

Flying is certainly a very greenhouse-gas emissions-intensive form of transport. Nonetheless it is complicated to compare it with other transport options with any precision. For many reasons:

Point-to-point flying will use the shortest possible route, whereas surface travel for the same journey will generally be longer. Of course, if a direct flight is not available, then the multi-hop flight distance for a particular trip may be longer than surface.

The majority of fuel consumption in most powered transport is to move the "vehicle" (airplane, train, bus, car...) rather than the passengers. So the "emissions per passenger" depends critically on the "occupancy" (relative to the carriage capacity of the vehicle). But this varies hugely from case to case. So that makes deciding on emissions benefits for different travel modes on a "case by case" basis very complex and difficult. (Mind you: the question of higher "class" air travel does significantly skew the occupancy question: obviously a given aircraft can only carry fewer business class, or much fewer first class, passengers, so the "emissions per passenger" go up in fairly exact proportion.)

Direct comparison is further complicated by the fact that flying doesn't just release greenhouse gases, especially CO ₂ (like all fossil fuel burning, including fossil-fueled surface vehicles), but it does so at high altitude. There is good science suggesting that this makes the climate impact (per tonne or litre of fuel burned) significantly greater for flying than surface travel - perhaps as much as a factor of two or more.

It can be argued (and is by many people) that "the airplane will be flying anyway", so the emissions associated with having one more or less passenger is negligible. Or putting that the other way around, by choosing to, say, drive a car (especially single occupancy) for a given trip, instead of flying, total emissions "associated" with the trip (car + passenger, since the plane flies "anyway") may actually be higher rather than lower. So it's actually better to fly than not (if that keeps occupancy factors on planes high)! But against that, of course, one can argue that it's the aggregation of trips that ultimately matters (Anderson's "systems level"). So individual decisions not to fly, if done consistently and at scale, would, by sheer economics, ultimately result in fewer actual planes being scheduled to fly, and thus consistently lower emissions. Though, on its own, that's still a weakish argument: if all those people still travel as far and as often, but now, in, say, single occupancy cars, then the total emissions are likely substantially higher.

There again, that was comparing flying with car travel, on the presumption that the car wouldn't otherwise travel. But that won't apply if comparing flying to travel on some other "shared" service (bus, train, ferry) where the other vehicle would also be travelling anyway.

An alternative way of coming at this then is to assume that we are working with some fixed total amount of passenger-km, and asking whether it makes sense to try to minimise the proportion of that undertaken by flying, as a long term, "system" objective? Viewed that way, a critical consideration is that, for surface travel (including high speed rail) there are existing, more-or-less mature, technical options to use non-fossil energy to power this (specifically, electricity from non-fossil fuel sources - solar, wind, hydro, nuclear...). For the moment only a minority of surface travel is actually powered in this way: but at least there is the prospect of progressively decarbonising the electricity source in this case. But there is little serious prospect of decarbonising flying, for at least several decades into the future (albeit, I am discounting aviation lobby arguments here, which rest on use of biofuels and/or "offsetting"). That being the case, one can say there is a strong argument that, as long as flying is fossil fueled, it just has to be abandoned. (Maybe, sometime in the future, we'll have serious non-fossil-fuel options for flying, and maybe then flying can come back into use: but right now, full decarbonisation of energy logically requires that we stop flying.)

OK, so that was all premised on a certain "fixed" amount of travel (total passenger-km) and asking whether some or all of it should be switched away from flying. But perhaps the "core" issue here is not "flying" per se, but the total amount of (fossil fueled) travel by any means: the total passenger-km undertaken. While emissions will vary somewhat (in complex and sometimes counter-intuitive ways) according to modal choices, the biggest, most reliable, gain would be by reducing total (fossil-fuel-powered) travel by all modes.

But even then, we still come back to flying as a special case. It is precisely because it is so fast, that it enables, facilitates, and encourages much more total passenger-km than would be likely to be undertaken if only slower modes were available. OK, high speed rail might be subject to a similar criticism, but then we come back to the fact that, at least in principle, rail can be very largely decarbonised whereas, as yet, flying can't. So further growth in high speed rail travel is not inextricably tied to growth in emissions in the way that air travel is.

Global inequity (in consumption and in climate change responsibility) is implicit in everything above: but I think it's fair to say that flying raises the equity question in a particularly acute form: the sheer pointed insult of rich people flying over poor and vulnerable people, blithly contributing further to their threats and risks, is so grotesque that to contemplate it seriously seems almost unbearable (so I, like most of the global "jet set", just don't contemplate it at all).

And taking all those things together, we just have the sheer symbolism, at least when it comes to individuals, but especially organisations, that claim to be working to fight climate change. While the best thing for us to do is minimise our absolute consumption impact (including passenger-km) overall, flying is such an extravagantly intensive form of climate pollution that engaging in it just can't but undermine the organisational message.

As I said, it's complicated!

Some additional references:

Finally, to everyone who happens to chance on this post, good luck pursuing flying less measures in your own local organisational context, whatever that may be!

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Aeromobility and climate: it's complicated! - DCU ECRN

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Participant contribution to the online workshop Academic aeromobility in a post-pandemic future organised by the Tyndall Centre, Manchester, 22 March 2022. This is a lightly edited version of an email response to a colleague who, reviewing the possibilities for "flying less", asked me to "...

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Joe Williams & Whitney Love (2022) Low-Carbon Research and Teaching in Geography: Pathways and Perspectives

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Joe Williams & Whitney Love (2022) Low-Carbon Research and Teaching in Geography: Pathways and Perspectives

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The Professional Geographer, 74:1, 41-51, DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2021.1977156

By Joe Williams, Cardiff University

In this paper my co-author and I analysed the major sources of emissions associated with one large Geography department. We found that by far the largest sources of emissions came from flying for staff research activities, closely followed by undergraduate fieldtrips.

We found a great deal of support for practical approaches to reducing aviation emissions in academia. This is in many ways the elephant in the room - an issue that many academics are anxious about, but not sure how to address.

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https://www.timetoexplane.com

Network goal: The goal of ExPlane is not to get universities to be completely flight-free; we recognise that this is not (yet) possible and not fair towards staff and students who can get more value out of their academic career by travelling. However, we want to get rid of unnecessary travel and ensure that all decisions to travel by plane are made consciously and with full awareness of the environmental impacts.

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http://lowcarbonmethods.com/

An open scholarly group thinking about the role of decarbonization on academic method, asking how the way we meet and conduct research might change in a world where we can no longer presume easy access to air travel (as well as energy-intensive digital storage)

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An alternative to the plane and the screen

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An alternative to the plane and the screen

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https://www.diymethods.net/
(a zine-based conference experiment)

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Low-Carbon Research: Building a Greener and More Inclusive Academy

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Low-Carbon Research: Building a Greener and More Inclusive Academy

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https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/363
(On the links between mobility and equity in academic travel practices)

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Upcoming workshops: (communicating) climate justice and aviation

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Upcoming workshops: (communicating) climate justice and aviation

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In addition to our ongoing work with ExPlane, we have been developing workshops on climate justice and aviation to together with our partners from Stay Grounded.

Participants can learn more about the social and ecological impacts of the aviation sector, greenwashing strategies and a just transition of the sector as well as concrete steps to “ground” organisations (including academic institutions).

The underlying report "Reframe, Rethink, Reshape: Grounding Aviation in a New Economy" is launching in April, and a number of online and offline trainings will be held in the upcoming months.

If you would like to be updated, you can follow our website - or contact me at kim@timetoexplane.com.

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At LOCEAN, the lab where I work in France we have implemented a CO2 individual quota mechanism that started last year. It will progressively reduce the max amount of air travel any lab member can make each year. It took us two years to get there and the story is far from over. Details can be found here: 

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At LOCEAN, the lab where I work in France we have implemented a CO2 individual quota mechanism that started last year. It will progressively reduce the max amount of air travel any lab member can make each year. It took us two years to get there and the story is far from over. Details can be found here: 

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[THREAD written w/ @YonaSilvy now translated after numerous requests from our english speaking colleagues]

On sept 29, our lab LOCEAN voted & adopted to a large majority 3 measures to ↘️ its carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, notably by ↘️✈️ 

How did we get here and why? ⬇️

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[THREAD written w/ @YonaSilvy now translated after numerous requests from our english speaking colleagues]

On sept 29, our lab LOCEAN voted & adopted to a large majority 3 measures to ↘️ its carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, notably by ↘️✈️ 

How did we get here and why? ⬇️ https://t.co/NFWIxEmA55

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[THREAD written w/ @YonaSilvy now translated after numerous requests from our english speaking colleagues]

On sept 29, our lab LOCEAN voted & adopted to a large majority 3 measures to ↘️ its carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, notably by ↘️✈️

How did we get here and why? ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/NFWIxEmA55
— JB Sallée (@jb_sallee) October 13, 2020

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[THREAD written w/ @YonaSilvy now translated after numerous requests from our english speaking colleagues]

On sept 29, our lab LOCEAN voted & adopted to a large majority 3 measures to ↘️ its carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, notably by ↘️✈️ 

How did we get here and why? ⬇️ https://t.co/NFWIxEmA55

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
[THREAD written w/ @YonaSilvy now translated after numerous requests from our english speaking colleagues]

On sept 29, our lab LOCEAN voted & adopted to a large majority 3 measures to ↘️ its carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, notably by ↘️✈️ 

How did we get here and why? ⬇️ https://t.co/NFWIxEmA55

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
[THREAD written w/ @YonaSilvy now translated after numerous requests from our english speaking colleagues]

On sept 29, our lab LOCEAN voted & adopted to a large majority 3 measures to ↘️ its carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, notably by ↘️✈️ 

How did we get here and why? ⬇️

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This is a publication of mine reflecting auto-ethnographically about not-flying, in a special issue on 'Rethinking Professional Geographical Practice in a Time of Climate Crisis' in The American Geographer

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Hypocrites in the air: should climate change academics lead by example? By: Kevin Anderson

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Hypocrites in the air: should climate change academics lead by example? By: Kevin Anderson

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http://kevinanderson.info/blog/hypocrites-in-the-air-should-climate-change-academics-lead-by-example/

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If and how to include individual circumstances in reporting (Louise Marie Busck-Lumholt, ICTA-UAB)

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If and how to include individual circumstances in reporting (Louise Marie Busck-Lumholt, ICTA-UAB)

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Together with colleagues, I have led initiatives for reduced air travel in two research groups: in a European PhD innovative training network (ITN) and at the environmental research institute (ICTA) at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). We have recently revived the initiative at ICTA.

From surveys, we identified the following key reporting challenges:

1. If and how to weigh the difference in justification between travel purposes

2. How to account for the difference between career stages and the professional ‘’need’’ of travelling

3. How to include alternative (grounded) options in reporting mechanisms

4. How to develop a context-specific reporting tool that is still scalable

5. Whom to report to in the (many) cases where host institution and funding institution is not the same

We are trying to include the above considerations in a comprehensive ‘’footprint’’ calculation which is more sensitive to the individual context than one that solely accounts for emissions. We experient with this at research group level.

It is extremely challenging to design an implementable and scalable reporting structure that accounts for individual circumstances. It quickly leads to a justification of the travel rather than a reevaluation of the need to travel. Still, we think a more nuanced and integrated approach can create a feeling of ownership among participants which will increase the use and impact of reporting and maybe inspire more ambitious target-setting at the institutional level.

Resources:

(Contact me for access to our draft toolbox)

https://coupled-itn.eu/2020/03/09/responsible-travel/

http://www.laseg.cat/en/news/26/towards-an-emission-reduction-protocol

https://www.uab.cat/Document/388/460/ICTA%20Responsible%20travel%20strategy%20vertical,4.pdf

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Presentation recordings from 'Reducing Academic Flying' symposium in 2019

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Presentation recordings from 'Reducing Academic Flying' symposium in 2019

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https://www.carbonneutraluniversity.org/reducing-academic-flying.html

A symposium on research and action, University of Sheffield, 13th November 2019.
​

How can we make Universities less dependent on air travel?
​
As Universities begin to face up to their responsibilities in the face of the climate emergency, cutting air travel is one of the quickest ways to make a big difference. But for academia, as for many professions, that is not straightforward. Key parts of University business and academic careers have become dependent on cheap and fast international travel.

An international symposium in Sheffield on the 13th of November brought together leading researchers into academic and business flight, as well as people with experience of initiatives that help to reduce flight dependence. Ten papers came from academics attending the event in Sheffield physically from across the UK, and attending remotely from Scandinavia, Australia and the USA. Around 30 people attended physically on the day, with around 80 attending remotely, from more than a dozen countries around the world.

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I am leading the environmental sustainability work at UKRI to look at research and innovation practise and how we can best help the sector reduce the footprint of actually doing research an innovation. Obviously travel is a key theme in that, but I can't claim to have the answers on what should be done yet. So far I have established from numerous discussions that it is very easy to suggest that funding organisations such as UKRI should just simply amend T&Cs on what we will fund and that will make a big difference, but having looked at the reality of that, it turns out it really is not that simple (happy to discuss the many complications with anyone interested but key problems include strategic institution level control/decisions vs those of the individual PIs/applicants, credibility of offsetting schemes, additional bureaucracy, the complexity of the funding landscape within UKRI and EDI issues just to name a few). So right now I am very keen to explore this topic further with people from across the research and innovation sector to better understand how we should/could take forward the matter of academic travel in our journeys to net zero with the view to better establishing where and how funders really can make a difference in this space.

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'essential' air travel and distributional fairness

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'essential' air travel and distributional fairness

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In 2020 we conducted a survey among staff at an Austrian university about potential measures to reduce academic air travel. A major concern respondents expressed in relation to measures that limit or disincentivise air travel is the potentially unfair distribution of resources (funds, carbon budgets, or permissible flights) both within and between departments and the conflicts that may ensue. First, several respondents pointed out that different research areas require different amounts of international travel. Distributing carbon travel budgets to departments according to their size or simply permitting a certain number of flights per person and year would thus penalise more globally connected disciplines.

Second, a significant number of respondents raised concerns that defining limits or introducing financial disincentives at the level of departments would result in professors and other senior researchers using up the largest share of available resources. This would make international travel difficult for young researchers who are, at the same time, most dependent on it for their career development. Thus, if carbon travel budgets per department are limited, dedicated quotas for early-stage researchers may be required.

Apart from fairness, the viability of alternatives emerged as another strong factor in the evaluation of restrictive measures. Highly restrictive measures that ban certain flights altogether can find remarkable support where viable alternatives exist, such as videoconferencing for practical meetings and train journeys for destinations with good rail connections and as a replacement for short-haul connecting flights.

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Map of academic air travel reduction and offsetting projects

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Map of academic air travel reduction and offsetting projects

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Academic Air Travel Reduction and Offsetting Projects - Google My Maps

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This map (status: November 2021, 95 entries) was created and is being maintained as part of a PhD project at ETH Zürich; for questions and comments, contact agnes.kreil@usys.ethz.ch. It may be edited by anyone with a Google account. Projects that include offsetting and reduction will only be displa…

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List of universities with stay grounded policies

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List of universities with stay grounded policies

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https://stay-grounded.org/organisations/examples/ - See our list of participating universities we feature there.

We will also have multiplier workshops coming (one on "grounding organisations with concrete tips on measures organisations can take") up from summer on, with ExPlane (timetoexplane.com/) working specifically with students and researchers at universities. If they are interested in the workshops, they can write an email - michaela@stay-grounded.org

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More and more organisations choose to stay grounded.

Find here inspiring examples of universities, NGOs and businesses as well as concrete measures they implemented to reduce their air travel.

In recent years, universities in Europe, the USA and Canada have increasingly become places of progressive and climate-friendly travel policy - there is a real growing movement in this sector. This accumulated knowledge can also be very helpful for other organisations in formulating and implementing travel policies.

These universities have enacted examplatory policies.

Find here the list of universities that joined our community of grounded organisations (by filling in our survey) and indicated measures they (will) implement to stay grounded.

Here is a list of universities that already implemented policies, as well as platforms for universities and grassroots initiatives:

Universities with grounded travel policies and guidelines

Belgium

Denmark

Germany

Netherlands

Norway

Switzerland

Sweden

United Kingdom

United States and Canada

Platforms for universities

Grassroots initiatives and proposals for travel policies at universities

There are not that many NGOs and businesses yet that have travel policies with the explicit goal of reducing air travel. Find here some initiatives, platforms and examples in a hopefully constantly growing list. If you have any hints regarding best practice examples, feel free to contact us! Of course, the resources regarding universities (see above) are also very helpful for corporations and NGOs.

Find here the list of NGOs and businesses that filled in our survey and indicated measures they (will) implement to stay grounded.

NGOs and businesses with grounded travel policies

Platforms for NGOs and corporations

Many organisations depend on funding from private or public institutions or have to abide by governmental regulations regarding business travel. These travel guidelines and the structure of the funded projects highly influence the ability of organisations to reduce their air travel. Also, more and more public institutions themselves are changing their travel policies.

Find below an expanding collection of some promising initiatives in this field.

Public institutions

Funding institutions

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Examples of Grounded Organisations - Stay Grounded

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Find here inspiring examples of universities, NGOs and businesses as well as concrete measures they implemented to reduce their air travel. In recent years, universities in Europe, the USA and Canada have increasingly become places of progressive and climate-friendly travel policy - there is a real growing movement in this sector.

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https://carbon.manchester.ac.uk/

A tool developed by academics at The University of Manchester to compare carbon emissions from different modes of transport and the possible carbon savings from switching to a different mode.

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Re-evaluating academic air travel: recent TC article

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Re-evaluating academic air travel: recent TC article

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https://theconversation.com/why-universities-are-starting-to-re-evaluate-their-academics-travel-177129

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As New Zealand starts lifting travel restrictions at the end of this month, academics may feel the need to catch up on missed opportunities to attend conferences.

But flights account for about a third of the tertiary sector's emissions and universities will need to reassess academic travel, given most across Australia and New Zealand, and indeed the world, are increasingly prioritising sustainability.

The push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions comes from all directions. There are national climate targets and sectoral initiatives like the carbon neutral government programme. Universities have sustainability strategies and there's "bottom-up" activism like the international Flying Less movement.

Academics are also examining their own frequent-flyer habits and how they reproduce persistent inequities born of colonialism.

COVID-19 has brought a slow-down in travel or, for most Australasian academics, a complete stop. This provides some breathing space to consider the future of academic mobility. For Australia and New Zealand, the question is particularly acute, as the "slow travel" options some suggest would be very, very slow indeed.

Read more: Universities have alerted us to the scale of the climate crisis - now they must lead in showing society how to solve it

Flying less for the climate

The climate-related dilemma for academics is well documented. Staff may be acutely aware of the impacts of their flying but some remain embedded in practices that require flying. Others are unwilling to fly less because international conferences are seen as a standard route to sharing results and professional advancement.

However, recent studies found limited evidence of a direct correlation between travelling and professional success, and questionable value added to publications from attending conferences.

These studies suggest improvements in diversity, early-career development and emissions can all be achieved by holding meetings and conferences online.

A look at one university's aviation practice

Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa has three campuses across New Zealand, a staff of 3,300 and a student population of 30,495 (in 2020). The university's greenhouse gas emissions come from farms, vehicles, energy use and an aviation school.

Despite this, its 2019 air travel of 11,833 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions comprises 29% of total emissions, equivalent to 67,180kms for each academic or staff member who flew.

The university's plan to reach net zero emissions by 2030 includes a commitment to reduce air travel by 30%. Current work identified five purposes of pre-COVID air travel, underpinning its research and teaching:

to strengthen networks and collaborations

to access resources and undertake fieldwork not available in New Zealand

to respond to external drivers such as the performance-based research fund, invitations and funder conditions

to build capacity and enhance staff skills

and to promote the university and recruit staff and students.

Massey's 2019 air travel data show 29% of staff flew internationally, and 61% of these trips were to attend conferences. Of all trips, 8% were short-haul to Australia and the south Pacific, totalling 6% of air-related carbon emissions. Long-haul trips made up 19% of all travel, but accounted for 80% of emissions.

Mirroring the highly skewed distribution of air travel globally, 71% of staff took no overseas trips in 2019, 18% took one to two trips, 6% took three to four trips, and 5% took five or more trips.

Read more: Travel the world without destroying it - Imagine newsletter #5

One of the ongoing discussions is how to measure the value of such travel. It is relatively easy to state on a travel application that the outputs will be a publication or a collaboration. But assessing the reality of those proposed outputs and their relative value for the individual or institution is difficult.

What staff think

The findings of a 2020 Massey University staff survey found most respondents agreed that international travel is crucial to the university's success. An even bigger majority thought it was crucial to their personal role. But a narrow majority also agreed such travel should be reduced.

The proportion of travel that respondents thought could be eliminated varied widely but averaged 50%. Further work identified information sharing, administration and meetings of established committees and research groups as activities that could be achieved without travel in the future.

The impact of less flying on early-career researchers, still in the process of developing their networks and academic careers, was a common theme. But it may be that air miles are dominated by a small number of hyper-mobile senior academics.

Possible actions for 2022 include further support for online events, developing contemporary travel metrics for the value of travel and reforming the university's leave policy to encourage longer but less frequent multi-purpose trips and to take emissions into account.

The New Zealand Universities Air Travel Consortium has been formed to share information and develop a coordinated nationwide pathway. Meanwhile, academic air travel has come almost to a stop. Conferences, seminars and committee meetings have gone online. It would not be a surprise if COVID-19 comes to be seen as a turning point in academic travel practices.

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Why universities are starting to re-evaluate their academics' travel

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As New Zealand starts lifting travel restrictions at the end of this month, academics may feel the need to catch up on missed opportunities to attend conferences. But flights account for about a third of the tertiary sector's emissions and universities will need to reassess academic travel, given most across Australia and New Zealand, and indeed the world, are increasingly prioritising sustainability.

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A tool for reporting, monitoring and reflecting on our air travel 

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A tool for reporting, monitoring and reflecting on our air travel 

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Here at the Stockholm Environment Institute, we have been working with Tranås Resbyrå, the Tyndall Centre, and the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation to develop a tool to report and track air travel, thereby working towards a culture of more sustainable travel behaviour.

The project, funded by the Swedish innovation agency, Vinnova, developed a tool to Track, Reflect and Reduce Air Travel (TR2AIL) as well as a report, based on our experiences on designing and implementing policies on business travel emissions, and how organizations can create an enabling and encouraging environment for reduced business travel emissions.

See this video for an introduction to the TR2AIL tool

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By Ben Anderson
Here at the University of Southampton, we are fortunate to have a mandated travel management provider whose database logs estimated emissions for every flight, rail and hotel booking. In theory. In truth some escapes - travel booked and paid for by third parties, own vehicle use and the use of travel modes for which emissions are not estimated are missing (ferry, taxi, hire car). And these are probably not missing at random; we just have to assume, for now, that they are marginal to the flights. Such is the nature of 'found' data - business process records, designed for one thing and re-purposed for another. In this case: monitoring as much of our business travel emissions as possible in as close to real time as possible.

Yes, we can look at baselines and trends since 2017/18 - by year, month, week, Faculty, School, purpose, transport mode and traveller. Except that the staff IDs recorded are those of the booker not the booked, Schools come and go, Faculties get restructured and people's names change. And let me tell you, matching name changers over time is non-trivial. So, while we can be sure that a given 'traveller name' was responsible for the emissions allocated to them, we cannot be sure that we have allocated all emissions to the right 'person'. If we're analysing the top 25% emitters, the name changers might be missing...

But our data analysis has at least started to give us tools and evidence to deploy - so what have we learned to date?

1. In common with other Universities and irrespective of year, about 95% of these emissions are 'normally' due to non-domestic flights.

2. Our business travel emissions fell off the COVID proverbial - 2020/21 was less that 1% of 2018/19. In 2021/22 to date it is ~ 9%. This means we are now engaged not in an exercise of 'reduction target setting' but an exercise in 'bounce-back cap setting' - how far back up are we prepared to let it go? Events dear boy...

3. What are we travelling for? If the 'reason' coding is to be trusted and a singular 'code' can even be assigned to the complexities of what one does on a trip, it's normally about 'Conferences'. And some 'Research', oh and some 'Business Meetings'. No s**t Sherlock...

4. More interestingly, we estimate that ~50% of emissions are due to ~5-6% of travellers (travellers, not staff). The 80:20 Pareto hypothesis basically holds true - 80% of emissions by 20% of travellers. We have estimated travel emissions gini coefficients and they are not pretty. If income was this unequal there'd be riots. Maybe riots are what we need...

So where next? We don't really subscribe to the information deficit model but we do think there is at least some mileage in engaging our colleagues with these patterns and, especially, in the different emissions footprints of different modes (and classes) of travel.

But in the end this is going to be about changing hearts, minds, norms, expectations and practices, especially of the big emitters. If we have learnt nothing else from the smart meter/energy use feedback debacle, it is that feedback and pretty plots are really not enough to do that. Over to Group 2...

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The system of academic aero mobility has locked in forms of long-haul mobility – from semesters abroad (as students) to fixed term contracts (as postdocs/research fellows) - all extending social networks and developing a lifestyle where frequent mobility is normalised. Because of this (and for other reasons) there is a blurring between work-related and leisure/ tourism forms of mobility, so it isn't always easy to distinguish between them or examine them in isolation from one another. Social and professional networks, as well as seniority, lead to requests for visits from students and scholars – how we account for these forms of mobility in reducing academic aero-mobility remains an unanswered question; we don’t want to ‘offshore’ mobility to others, with the result of continued – or increased – total travel related emissions. It is important that efforts to reduce aviation emissions respect disciplinary differences in needs for corporal mobility (i.e., differential importance of in person conferences, and for fieldwork) as well as differences across career stages – blanket rules will unequally impact some scholars and scholarship. Moreover, there is a critical need for role modelling from senior scholars (heads of schools, research centres, senior professors), not only in messaging but in material action. This includes the need for greater scrutiny of university senior management travel. To date this has been largely ignored by university policy and research (perhaps because senior management teams are remaining conspicuously quiet about their own practice!).
Debbie Hopkins, University of Oxford

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By Joseph Nevins
In relatively wealthy institutions of higher education, particularly ones that have embraced “internationalization,” flying—by faculty, students, and administrators—is typically central to their modus operandi. To the extent that institutions both facilitate and encourage such flying, and the profligate consumption and CO2 emissions with which it is associated, there are many things that they can do to reduce air travel.
Here are a small number of ideas.

1. Develop a carbon budget for the institution and units (e.g., academic departments) within it; the budget should decline each year in a manner commensurate with emission reduction targets advocated by the IPCC.

2. Conduct job searches/interviews by video conference; and require that lectures that would otherwise involve the speaker traveling by air take place via video conference.

3. Establish policies that require that academic and administrative staff prioritize travel-free meetings and video conferencing over physical travel and, when travel is needed, collective forms of ground transportation for destinations within, say, 12 hours of travel of the institution. (See, for example, the “Flying Less Policy” of the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University in Montreal. See, also, this document from ETH Zurich.)

4. Organize the academic calendar so that it minimizes travel. In the United States, for example, many students fly home for the Thanksgiving holiday and then return to campus for a brief period to complete the fall semester, after which they return home again. Were the semester to start earlier and end before Thanksgiving, it would halve such travel. Similarly, rather than having a long mid-semester break, have numerous short breaks at various points across the semester.)

5. For semester abroad programs, incentivize programs in countries that can be reached by low-carbon modes, and disincentivize those that require flying.

6. Develop a carbon code of conduct for students and academic staff to set clear expectations about their travel practices and that encourages low-emitting, surface forms of transport.

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Veronica Ahonen - University of Helsinki

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Veronica Ahonen - University of Helsinki

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We, especially as green academics often think that by working with sustainability issues we are “absolved” of our sins of flying to the occasional conference – especially if these events contribute to the discussion around solving the climate crisis. However, it is exactly this dilemma that poses the problem: if those with the most knowledge of environmentally harmful behavior do not change, how can the general public be expected to follow?

We have come to regard these events as essential because they handle essential topics. But the pandemic has proven us that there really is the opportunity to network and participate in workshops and conferences online. Instead, we should reframe the issue around the topics of what exactly makes these events essential. In my in-process paper, I surveyed Finnish academics to identify the necessities of travel, and the conclusions were that meeting new people, informality and randomness are the key aspects that cannot be replaced virtually. Thus, events of this nature should be prioritized when organizing events in person, with existing network events being online.

It is also the vulnerable academics that would benefit from corporeal presence the most: early-career researchers and those with grant funding, whereas senior academics already have established networks. Incidentally, they are also often the ones who fly the most. To fully tackle this issue, we must approach reductions from a perspective of mobility justice (and injustice).

Veronica Ahonen – Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland
Read more of my past research in Sustainability: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2948/htm

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A 6 Episode podcast on Spotify/iTunes/Anchor addressing questions around why do we fly as academics and could we fly less. By the Oxford Flying Less Group, School of Geography and with contributions from people across the university.

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Listen to The Oxford Flying Less podcast on Spotify. The Flying Less podcast. The podcast which asks - what do you and your university stand to gain by Flying Less? Global aviation is likely to use up about one sixth of the remaining carbon budget to keep the world under 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

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Tyndall Centre
CAST

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Please add links to your projects, papers, communities and reports here, including a very short description. Moderation will ensure these are short (~100 words) to maintain readability.

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Paper: Hoolohan et al. (2021) Responding to the climate emergency: how are UK universities establishing sustainable workplace routines for flying and food? Climate Policy 21(7)

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Paper: Hoolohan et al. (2021) Responding to the climate emergency: how are UK universities establishing sustainable workplace routines for flying and food? Climate Policy 21(7)

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https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2021.1881426

Key Insights

Reducing emissions in the higher education sector requires organizations to foster low-carbon academic practices by engaging with the systemic cultural and material conditions that support high-carbon academic practices.

The establishment of robust targets, action plans and monitoring processes would further support sector-wide decarbonization, and require consensus across HE institutions and governing bodies.

Targets alone will not achieve reductions in Scope 3 emissions. These are complex areas of business practice that relate to organisational cultures and practices.

A climate emergency framing requires all organizations to use their full range of influence to rapidly and substantially reduce emissions.

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Claire Hoolohan, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and ESRC Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation.

There are a multitude of reasons to reduce academic flying, not least to reduce impacts on the climate and improve the inclusivity of academic work. This has been evident for years. Recently however, there has been a widespread uptake of virtual ways of working and an almost wholesale elimination of flying for academic work, results of measures to contain Covid-19. Without belittling the profound negative consequences of Covid-19, this period has allowed us to observe the rapid and widespread diffusion of alternative ways of working, and a moment to question what the future of university work might be.

Until Covid, working life was becoming increasingly temporally and geographically distributed. Long-distance business travel, and particularly air travel, had become a normal part of university business, field trips, conference attendance, and international knowledge exchange. However, participation in air travel, and the consequences of non-participation, are uneven, intersecting with other inequalities linked to disability, gender, race and class. Therefore, reducing air travel presents an effective means of reducing universities’ emissions and also an opportunity to establish inclusive and accessible ways of working.

The Tyndall Centre aims to inform society's transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient world, and this includes looking inwards at the practices taking place in the higher education sector (Hoolohan et al., 2021; Whitmarsh et al., 2020). The ESRC Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation focusses on understanding how moments of change – including extensive disruptions to society, like Covid-19 – can inform sustainability transitions (www.cast.ac.uk). These aims lead us to this workshop, with an objective to support ongoing action to decarbonise higher education and catalyse further action to reduce flying.

We propose that as higher education recovers from the pandemic, now is the time to solidify and extend ways of working that reduce air travel. This workshop focusses on how this can be achieved. We are excited to hear your ideas and welcome a thoughtful and lively, generative discussion.

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https://thefutureofmeetings.wordpress.com/

Compilation of references and articles: https://thefutureofmeetings.wordpress.com/articles/

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Padlet produced for the workshop, which is filled with opinion comments, links and further resources shared by participants.

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https://businesstravelroundtable.ac

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https://flyingless.de/en/

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Successful research, less flying - FlyingLess

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https://sites.tufts.edu/flyingless/

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Flying Less in Academia: A Resource Guide

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Flying Less in Academia: A Resource Guide

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http://flyinglessresourceguide.info

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Matt Woodthorpe – EAUC Scotland Programme Manager

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Matt Woodthorpe – EAUC Scotland Programme Manager

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Data collection is a critical step to achieving positive impacts in reducing institutional emissions, including those arising from business travel. Without data collection and ongoing monitoring of business travel emissions, institutional leaders are highly unlikely to take action in reducing these emissions, or be able to see the whole impact of actions that have been taken.

Within a Scotland since 2015/16, all universities and colleges have had an obligation to report institutional emissions to the Scottish Government each year (known as Public Bodies Climate Change Duty Reporting). EAUC Scotland works closely with institutions to help support the improvement in quality of emissions reporting and to expand the scope of what is reported. Our sector analysis of Scottish university emissions for 2018/19 (latest non-covid reporting year) highlighted that 19.6% of the reported sector emissions came from business travel, of which 94% came from air travel. Having institutions collect and monitor this data means that we can see that a) aviation emissions for business travel form a significant proportion of institutional emissions; and b) there is significant potential for institutions to reduce these emissions as part of net zero commitments.

With many ‘easy-win’ emission reductions projects such as LED lighting and IT upgrades having already been initiated across campuses, reducing aviation activities can be the next big-win with many co-benefits – it offers institutions the opportunity to reduce emissions, improve work-life balance for staff, improve global collaboration through virtual inclusivity, and save operational costs. The first step to achieving this is having the tools to collect the data and leadership – be that from a Sustainability Lead, an interested Head of Department, or a Senior Management Leader seeing this aligning with institutional goals. We shouldn’t let perfection get in the way of progress – the data doesn’t need to be perfect, but collecting is a must to achieve institutional action.

Further resources:

EAUC Scotland Travel Better Package

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Magdalena Garcia - University of Montreal

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Magdalena Garcia - University of Montreal

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There is an opportunity to think the academic culture from the climate crisis. As a Latin American woman and PhD student, I argue that virtual conferences offer the opportunity to fly less and reduce carbon emissions and advance towards the democratization in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Our knowledge of the world comes mainly from the English-speaking world. The knowledge produced in an Anglo-American context is posed as universal and therefore more valued. despite calls by Southern and indigenous scholars to decolonize research and knowledge, insufficient attention continues to be paid to the profound global inequalities that shape their profession. For my colleagues in Chile, travel to conferences is a challenge. Academic funding or travel to conferences is considerably less in universities and research centers in the South than those in the North. In addition to language limitations and other logistical difficulties such the obtention of visas. Confronting inequalities in knowledge production requires strategies to reduce barriers, the cost and logistics of travel to a conference being one of them. Undoubtedly, virtual technologies will not eliminate centuries of colonialism, systemic racism, masculinities, and hegemonies of knowledge production. But at least, I think it brings people together who otherwise would not be able to. Thinking about decolonization in the production and dissemination of knowledge and the responsibility to reduce emissions in the academic world is not only an ethical issue. Including people, places that are otherwise excluded, allow, I propose, to rethink in the face of the crises we are living.

Magdalena Garcia - PhD Researcher at the University of Montreal, Canada

To go further please have a look at my article published at the Professional Geographer:
https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2021.1915812

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Other issues for discussion  - testimonies

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Other issues for discussion  - testimonies

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Please add comments (below 250 words) with issues that you consider relevant in this conversation, not included within the three topics above.

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Group 3: Effective reporting to reduce academic air travel carbon emissions.

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Group 3: Effective reporting to reduce academic air travel carbon emissions.

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Through holistic and transparent reporting can support action to reduce emissions, monitoring and accounting alone are insufficient to catalyse change (Hoolohan et al., 2021). This group considers what effective reporting to reduce emissions looks like, exploring reporting challenges and identifying those that must be overcome to reduce flying in higher education. Presently reporting and target setting are limited in a variety of ways: data is incomplete (and difficult to complete), data is insufficiently granular to enable consideration of equality and inclusion, and the widespread use of relative targets creates the possibility that emissions reductions will be insufficient to deliver absolute emission reductions in line with the climate emergency framing.

Therefore, this group considers:

How can improvements to reporting, monitoring and target setting support a reduction in flying? How do we ensure that fact-finding does not hinder action?

What are the most important gaps in data and how can they be filled?

What are the priorities for improving reporting?

Who could support the effective reporting, monitoring and target setting?

What is needed from them to ensure that reporting supports effective action?

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Group 2: Cultural changes to decouple aeromobility from academic work.

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Group 2: Cultural changes to decouple aeromobility from academic work.

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Initiatives to reduce air travel in academia have been driven by the example set by pioneer individuals who decided to avoid flying in their academic endeavours, and by actions intended to encourage individual members of staff to fly less. However, academic aeromobility is sustained by the wider system of funding, ranking, governance, infrastructures, networking and collaboration. In this discussion, we want to reflect on how to provide united and concerted recommendations on differently shaping academic practices. In this discussion, we consider how reconfiguration of the institutional context of higher education might enable legitimate alternatives to corporeal engagement. Building on the literature on academic aeromobility (e.g. Storme et al., 2017 ), we aim to elaborate on the expectations that underlie demand for mobility and what alternatives exist that would support lower levels of flying.

Therefore, this group considers:

How does corporeal mobility become dominant?

What supports corporeal mobility, and how might changes support alternative ways of working?

How can alternative ways of working be legitimised and normalised throughout higher education?

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Group 1: Reducing academic aeromobility: Gains in accessibility, inclusivity and Justice.

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Group 1: Reducing academic aeromobility: Gains in accessibility, inclusivity and Justice.

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The Covid pandemic has shown that virtual and remote work can improve the efficiency of academic work, and effective collaborations can be held online (e.g. Jack and Glover, 2021). This discussion wants to identify and report the opportunities and benefits of maintaining more virtual and remote collaborations. On the other hand, the pandemic has increased the visibility of issues linked to accessibility and inclusion in academic work. Assuming a small amount of air travel will continue to be needed to ensure fair and effective academic work, at least in the short term, this group considers what ‘essential’ air travel means, and the purpose it would serve (and for who). We include within this discussion how to ensure accessibility and inclusivity both internally in individual institutions, and globally to address historical and ongoing inequalities in participation in higher education.

Therefore, this group considers:

What does ‘essential’ air travel mean in the context of higher education?

How should air travel be prioritised (person, destination, duration, purpose etc.)?

What needs to change within higher education to enable this prioritisation to move from principal to reality?

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I am Vasco Zeferina, a researcher working in the Tyndall Centre for climate change research at the University of Manchester. Since January 2022, I have led a research initiative that attempts to analyse the effects of the COVID 19 – pandemic on aero mobility in academia. The research project aims to examine how we foster lessons learnt from the pandemic experience in the future, which decouples aero mobility from academic practices. I have reviewed the literature for the last few weeks and interviewed/chatted with some of you (academics, sustainability officers, educational coordination agents). The idea for an initiative like the workshop Tyndall Centre is organising was discerned, influenced and shaped by these conversations and readings. I hope the workshop contributes to the further decoupling aeromobility from academic practices and foster deliberated, united and concerted actions from this research community. Thanks for joining the discussion!

You can read my comment on the three main topics covered in this workshop in the link below.

https://docs.google.com/

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Since the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual communication has more frequently been used as a substitute for academic air travel than ever before. A survey among professors at ETH Zurich as well as other studies show that virtual communication and especially virtual scientific conferences are perceived as ineffective and unsuitable for informal exchanges, socializing, and networking. Thus, I use qualitative and quantitative data to analyze how novel formats and tools can facilitate effective virtual informal exchange and scientific networking during conferences and beyond. First insights gained from the literature and a series of surveys have made it clear that it will be necessary to specifically consider these informal parts in a variety of ways when planning scientific conferences, workshops, and meetings, since they do not simply arise spontaneously in virtual settings. Initial results suggest that virtual informal networking no longer seems impossible. Scheduled one-on-one chats, planned informal discussions in small groups, and themed chat channels/communication forums seem most promising and feasible with today’s virtual tools. Researchers also like tools that allow them to meet new colleagues by chance (e.g., matchmaking apps or apps like gather.town). While it remains challenging to move socializing online (such as enjoying lunch/dinner together or engaging in social activities), initial attempts are being made to organize online team games and doctoral graduation parties. Fostering deeper relationships and building trust is not easy in virtual settings. This could be caused/reinforced by the lack of gestures/mimicry/eye contact or the lack of a shared sense of space. Based on my own experience of starting a doctorate during the Covid-19 pandemic, I am convinced that investigating best virtual informal networking practices can further increase the acceptance of virtual communication and play a part in reducing academic air travel.

Ariane Wenger, doctoral student at TdLab, ETH Zurich

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Parke Wilde - Video Testimony

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The FLIGHT Project: Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations: from data to practice.

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The FLIGHT Project: Decreased CO2-emissions in flight-intensive organisations: from data to practice.

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https://www.kth.se/sv/hct/mid/research/sustainability/projects/flight-1.920661