Air travel in academia: Difference between revisions

Air travel is an essential part of the professional lives of many academics, and a major source of pollution from that sector. In the context of the climate crisis, there have been appeals to reduce air travel by replacing it with other modes of transportation, replacing it with videoconferencing, or renouncing inessential trips.

Role of air travel in academia

The individual emissions of academic researchers are high compared to other professionals, "primarily as a result of emissions from flying to conferences, project meetings, and fieldwork".^[1][2] Moreover, fields such as computer science have a conference-publishing system which requires researchers to travel to conferences in order to publish their results.^[3]

Beyond their usefulness for doing research, travels are motivated by career incentives, as decisions to award faculty positions or research funding depend in part on the applicants' activity as speakers at international conferences. Academics perceive air travel as a key driver for career progression.^[4] Touristic opportunities also contribute to motivating these travels, which are considered as a perk of the profession.^[1][5]

While conferences and meetings are important for exchanging ideas and nurturing professional relationships, this can also be done using alternative modes of communication such as videoconferencing and social media. It has been argued that the benefits of face-to-face meetings might be outweighed by the benefits of the alternatives. (These benefits may include reaching wider communities.)^[1] A 2019 study found that air travel was correlated to salary but not to scientific productivity, and concluded that "air travel has a limited influence on professional success".^[6]

Attitude of academic institutions

A 2014 study of three New Zealand universities found that rhetoric on sustainability coexisted with assumptions about the necessity to travel, and policies that encouraged travel.^[7] A similar phenomenon was observed in Australia, where "a normative system of ‘academic aeromobility’ has developed".^[8] Australian universities could be divided into three groups, depending on whether they recognize the sustainability issues with air travel, and if yes whether they seek to substitute air travel with videoconferencing.^[9]

Attitude of academics

A 2017 survey found that conservationists' environmental footprint was only slightly lower than economics' and medics', and that exposure to environmental information had little impact on researchers' behaviour.^[10]

Flying often has been argued to be incompatible with anthropologists' research ethics.^[11] In the case of archaeology, flying often while knowing about the problem of climate change has been denounced as a case of cognitive dissonance.^[12]

Climate hypocrisy

How much scientists fly may not affect their professional credibility, but it does affect their credibility when they communicate to the public on climate change,^[13][2] and prevents them from exercising leadership in reducing emissions.^[14] In particular, a 2016 survey has found that climate researchers' carbon footprints have a large effect on their credibility, and on participants' intentions to reduce their personal energy consumption.^[15][16] A 2019 study also found a large effect on participants' support for public policies advocated by the researchers.^[17] A professor at the University of Cambridge was accused of hypocrisy in 2019 by farmers for flying while working to reduce red meat consumption.^[18]

The idea of researchers' climate hypocrisy regularly appears in media coverage of climate change. Hypocrisy discourses can be invoked both for supporting and for resisting climate-friendly policies.^[19][20]

Quantitative estimations

Aircraft affect the climate in a variety of ways: they emit Template:CO2 and nitrogen oxides, produce contrails, and might affect cloud formation. There is considerable uncertainty on some of these effects.^[21] Quantitative estimations mostly focus on Template:CO2 emissions.

Estimated emissions

The Template:CO2 emissions for a single conference trip were estimated to 7% of an average individual’s total annual Template:CO2 emissions. The total emissions of scientists travelling to conferences for presenting papers were estimated to 0.228% of international aviation emissions in 2008.^[22]

In a case study of a PhD project, mobility represented 75% of the carbon footprint, which could have been reduced by 44% using videoconferencing. The total emissions were 21.5t Template:CO2-eq or 2.69t Template:CO2-eq per peer-reviewed paper.^[23] (In comparison, the carbon footprint of computers, printers, etc is estimated to only 5.44kg Template:CO2-eq per paper.^[24])

Estimated possible reductions

• Scientific organizations could reduce the carbon footprints of their meetings by up to 73% by alternating large national or international meetings with regional ones every other year, according to a 2011 study.^[15]
• Optimizing the locations of the conferences of the International Biogeography Society could reduce emissions by about 20%, according to a 2014 study.^[25]
• Organizing a large conference in two sites (connected by videoconferencing) on different continents has reduced emissions by 37% or 50% compared to organizing the conference in either site, according to a 2012 study.^[26]

Reduction of emissions

Taxes on air travel

The University of California, Los Angeles has been taxing its departments $9 per domestic flight and $25 per international flight.^[27]

Low-carbon conferences

Conference organizers have reduced the emissions due to the travel of participants by several methods:

• Holding virtual conferences.
• Holding decentralized conferences, with several virtually connected regional hubs, rather than a single location.
• Optimizing conference locations and frequencies.

Voluntary reduction in air travel

For researchers, reducing air travel is "the biggest opportunity for reducing personal climate impacts".^[15] Some academics therefore reduce or stop flying in order to reduce their individual carbon footprints and/or to lead by example.^[28] Travel for fieldwork can be reduced by good planning.^[29]

The feasible reductions, and impact on careers, depend on the researchers' seniority. Graduate students and postdocs fly less than full professors, but attending conferences is considered more important for their careers.^[30]

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus stopped flying in 2014, and claimed that slow travel made "his world shrink and become richer".^[31] Physicist Shaun Hendy avoided planes for a year in 2018, and wrote a book on the experience.^[32] Climatologist David Reay has foregone air travel as part of "staving off despair".^[33]

External links

• Les ressources, a list of references including many on air travel in academia, by Labos 1point5.
• Campus carbon neutrality at Wikipedia.
• Eco-friendly conferences at Sustainatility in Science wiki.
• Parke Wilde's Flying less blog.
• International Civil Aviation Organization's carbon calculator.
• The Roundtable of Sustainable Academic Travel, a network of academic institutions started in 2018 for measuring and reducing carbon emissions.

References

Template:Reflist