Do you really need to fly to that next conference? With greenhouse gas emissions still on the rise globally, faculty and staff at UBC are starting to weigh the ethical impacts of work-related air travel. Luckily, UBC Library has built a tool to make that decision easier.
Time is running out as the battle heats up
Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we are nearing a critical threshold. Despite current efforts, we are more likely than not to surpass a global temperature increase of 1.5°C in the near-term, that “we are already seeing the repercussions,” and that greater climate action is needed urgently.
As part of the UBC Climate Action Plan 2030, UBC has committed to reducing business air travel emissions to 50% of 2019 levels by 2030. Business air travel undertaken by UBC faculty and staff is a significant source of the university’s carbon emissions, but shifting the cultural norms is not an easy feat.
Dr. Christina Laffin, Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies, is a member of the Department of Asian Studies’ Sustainability Initiative Committee and also meets regularly with an interdepartmental group to discuss climate action at UBC. The group brings together climate action committee members from the Departments of Earth, Oceans and Atmospheric Sciences, Geography, Asian Studies, and UBC Library.
It was through this group, that Laffin learned about UBC Library’s Air Travel Decision Tree, a two-page framework document that guides individuals through the decision-making process for work-related air travel.
“There are broader issues that need to be addressed in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, but clearly faculty are some of the worst active emitters,” says Laffin, who has started using the tree as part of her own business travel planning.
UBC Library enters the fray
In October 2019, a group of UBC Library faculty and staff began meeting monthly to address the existential threat posed by climate change and to discuss actions that could be taken to reduce the library’s carbon emissions footprint. The group also wanted to find new ways to share climate change-related resources, and partner with other sustainability groups on campus.
The Library #ClimateAction Team (L#CAT) has since burgeoned to include members from both Vancouver and Okanagan campuses, as well as representation from a majority of the library’s branches and units. While the team has spearheaded several events and activities, including climate-related film screenings, creation of the Climate Change research guide, participation in Climate Action Week, and most recently hosting a booth at UBC’s Climate Emergency Fair, the tool that has seen the most engagement has been the Air Travel Decision Tree.
“There was a decision tree produced by Lund University in 2015 that had been floating around different institutions for a while. We took that tree, fleshed it out, worked in some content like the climate justice piece, and made it more accessible. We also situated the framework within a Canadian context,” says Elizabeth Stevenson, Circulation Supervisor at Woodward Library, and current L#CAT co-chair.
Changing behaviour one question at a time
The library also provides two key ingredients that make the framework particularly useful: first, a scholarly understanding of air travel’s impact on climate emissions, and second, an uncomplicated process that individuals can follow to determine whether air travel is necessary, along with the implications of that decision.
While the decision tree presents a streamlined process that is easy to navigate, it is not a simple fix, notes Laffin: “It deals with the complexities of things like career stages. What makes travel meaningful is different for somebody in an early career stage, or an intermediate one, or somebody who’s a more established scholar.”
Mathew Vis-Dunbar, Data and Digital Scholarship Librarian at UBC Okanagan Library, who co-authored the decision tree with Stevenson, is already looking to future iterations of the framework: “One of the things that we have talked about is an extension to the decision tree. It’s one thing to have people self-reflecting about how we do travel. But it’s another thing to articulate for individuals who are hosting events: how do you make those events meaningful while providing the option for people not to travel?”
As a faculty member, there are many professional activities besides conferences which also require travel, notes Vis-Dunbar. How can faculty members shift to remote participation in these activities, without sacrificing career progression, academic influence, or networking opportunities? The task then becomes a matter of shifting mindsets, to make non-travel academic activities as equally meritorious as activities that require an in-flight menu.
“Trying to rethink how we carry out scholarship and networking right now is such a great opportunity,” says Laffin. “Whether it’s small-scale workshops or large-scale conferences with thousands of people attending—all of that needs rethinking.”
For now, faculty and staff who choose to forgo the next conference trip can lean on the Air Travel Decision Tree to do the heavy lifting from an ethical and sustainability viewpoint. “It’s low hanging fruit from my perspective. There are such high greenhouse gas emissions associated with air travel,” says Stevenson. “We hope it will become a regular practice for the UBC community to use the tree in their decision-making.”