• 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?

• 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? 

• 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?

• EAUC Scotland Travel Better Package

• 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.

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.

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...

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