Carbon budgets ‘not the way’ to reduce academic air miles

Institutional carbon budgets risk fostering a one-size-fits-all approach to academics’ climate impacts, punishing those who really need to fly just as much as those who do so by habit, a professor has claimed.

University of Auckland development studies expert Andreas Neef advocated incentives rather than centralised “control and compliance” in reducing universities’ travel-related carbon footprints.

For example, he said, academics who renounce travel opportunities could earn bonus points in performance appraisals. This might encourage them to consider whether keynote speeches could be delivered remotely, or passed on to junior colleagues.

“Often, the PhD students do the work and the professor presents [it],” he said. “It’s not fair. Professors tend to fly 10 times more than PhD students.”

Professor Neef is analysing the carbon footprint of academic travel as part of a special interest group investigating the climate impacts of human mobility. The group draws expertise from across the Worldwide Universities Network, an alliance of 26 institutions in six continents, in fields such as education, philosophy, engineering, urban planning and tourism.

A recent UK report proposed institutional carbon budgets to sustain the reduction in academic air travel during the pandemic. Professor Neef said opponents of travel reduction policies claimed that such arrangements could undermine research productivity.

But a 2019 University of British Columbia study found no relationship between air travel emissions and academic productivity – although those who did not fly at all performed poorly on productivity metrics, suggesting that a “threshold” amount of air travel was necessary.

The 2019 study also found that early career academics were responsible for fewer air travel emissions than their senior counterparts, and that highly paid academics produced more emissions regardless of their seniority. Professor Neef said this suggested that academics with the least need to travel were doing the most.

He said institution-wide carbon targets might fail to consider early career academics, who needed to build relationships with international colleagues who “read your work and quote you in their applications”. Different disciplines, roles and projects also carry different travel demands, he added.

“It’s very difficult for an outsider to say what is the reasonable carbon budget for certain research. You have to take into account the…fieldwork necessary for an anthropologist, for example, to gather data. For someone who works in a lab, a conference is kind of a bonus but it’s not an absolute necessity.”

Professor Neef said conferences, which accounted for more than half of academics’ air travel emissions, were the least compelling reason to fly. “Many people argue [they] have to present [papers] to get feedback from colleagues at the conference,” he said. “Two or three questions after a 15-minute presentation [are unlikely to] dramatically alter the direction of your paper. You can get feedback by sending them a draft.”

He also supported educative approaches to scaling back academics’ air travel, saying it was a mistake to assume that greenhouse impacts were widely understood. “Many academics are not really aware of the carbon footprint of their academic travel.

“One of our professors said: ‘I don’t have children. I don’t eat meat. I cycle to the university. I should be entitled to fly to a few conferences a year, because I do my bit.’ They claim that they offset the air travel through their personal behaviour, but the emissions from international air travel massively exceed everything else.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com