Hello all,
To echo Holly, I think this petition is actually initiating a conversation to change the institutional support *system* behind the ever-increasing demand on academics to travel in order to collaborate and achieve conventional notions of career “success." Thus, I think it is working to surpass the individual-centric focus.
While sometimes the benefits of air travel may outweigh the harms, we do not yet have the tools to identify when such cases present themselves, and are limited to relying on our subjective judgment, especially in cases where air travel may simply be unavoidable. A report on this very subject was released back in March: Towards a Culture of Low-Carbon Research for the 21st Century (http://tyndall.ac.uk/sites/default/files/twp161.pdf). Not only does it highlight the urgency for academics who are advocating more sustainable futures to be leading by example, but it offers innovative ways of creating institutional policies for lower-carbon traveling, such as a decision tree, a Travel Tracker app, and a justification scheme for different traveling options based on individual's career stage and reasons for the travel.
As in the book Beyond Flying: Rethinking Air Travel in a Globally Connected World, the impact of flying (~2.5% of global GHG emissions, which would make it the 7th highest emitter if ranked among countries, and emissions from flying are expected to increased 2-4.5 fold by 2050 without policy intervention) is especially concerning given the fact that, “flying is an elite activity… only 5 percent of people alive today have every flown, and of those, very few are frequent flyers… it may be that just 1 per cent of humanity is responsible for 80 percent of the world’s flights.”
The urgency of the situation leads me (even as a very early career researcher, also from the very dispersed, flight-dependent U.S.) to conclude that we do not have time to wait around for carbon taxes or other policy/transport infrastructure to begin shifting such habits, especially given that flying far surpasses the impact of every other aspect of an individual's ecological footprint.
Best,
Raychel
Raychel Santo
MSc Candidate in Food, Space and Society
Cardiff University School of Planning and Geography
Program Coordinator (part-time), Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
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