University researchers have been branded “hypocrites” for condemning air travel as bad for the planet but then flying to conferences anyway.
A study found that about a third of the academics at a leading UK university had flown to at least one meeting in the previous year, despite a large majority expressing concerns about aviation emissions.
“There is a level of hypocrisy: academics know that flying is bad for the environment,” said Professor Jonas De Vos of UCL, the lead author of the study. “But still, we often fly to international conferences, often to [make the argument] that society should be more sustainable.”
Aviation is estimated to account for about 4 per cent of global warming and almost all climate scientists agree that reductions in air travel would be needed to meet the 1.5C Paris target. During the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a shift to holding conferences and other events online.
However, in a study published in the journal Global Environmental Change, De Vos and his colleagues describe how flying remains “deeply embedded in how the global academic system functions”.
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Aviation emissions are produced by a small minority of the global population, they add, which means they are often seen as “a particularly unjust” form of pollution. “Academics are one of the groups with privileged, yet highly unsustainable, lifestyles,” they write.
“Despite ever-increasing volumes of academic research and teaching on environmental sustainability … air transport remains a large contributor to academic carbon footprints, even among scholars researching environmental or climate topics.”
The new study provides one of the most detailed snapshots yet of the attitudes of researchers, lecturers and other university staff on flying, and how they ultimately end up travelling. More than 1,100 members of University College London filled in surveys. More than 80 per cent of them said flying was detrimental for the planet.
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However, about 35 per cent had flown to a conference or other work meeting in the previous year, with professors and PhD students being the most frequent travellers. This period included the 12 months up to March 2023, when Covid was still interrupting some travel plans and De Vos suspects the figure would now be higher.
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He said researchers often feel pressured to travel, with presenting work at international conferences seen as necessary to win promotions and funding.
Three quarters of the academics agreed that international conferences should be organised in cities easily accessible by high-speed trains, and that trains should be cheaper and rail networks expanded. Online alternatives to traditional conferences were not seen as offering the same opportunities to network.
On the website NoFlyClimateSci.org, several climate scientists explain why they have decided to cut down on flying for work. They include Dr Lennart de Nooijer of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who describes how he became uneasy with work travel when he realised many of his colleagues were planning to stay on for a personal holiday after a conference being held in Chile. “Isn’t part of the attraction of attending conferences and meetings the sheer pleasure of visiting other countries?” he said.
De Vos added that it was rare for researchers to feel the need to be role models. ”Some academics practise what they preach: they don’t fly at all. But I have the impression that for most academics, the visibility of their work is often more important,” he said.
“It doesn’t place academia in a good light — there is a mismatch between attitudes and behaviour.”
