Universities are both disseminators and producers of the climate knowledge needed to institute the social and cultural change required for climate adaptation and mitigation to occur. They also have the opportunity to lead and model pro-environmental behavior, yet often have large carbon budgets, partly caused by staff travel. This paper explores this topic via an institutional case study of what factors motivate the academic community to undertake plane travel and the implications this has for wielding wider societal influence in terms of pro-environmental behavior. We report on a year-long qualitative social science study of academic plane travel at the University of Adelaide, South Australia where we investigated the tension between academic requirements to travel and the institution’s formal commitment to sustainability within the Campus Sustainability Plan. We found that, while many academics were worried about climate change, very few were willing to change their current practice and travel less because they are not institutionally incentivized to do so. There is a fear of not flying: plane travel is perceived as a key driver for career progression and this is an ongoing barrier to pro-environmental behavior. We conclude that institutional and political change will be required for individual change to occur and sustainable agendas to be met within academic communities.
Smoldering combustion
is an important combustion process in wildfires;
however, there are fewer experimental studies recorded in the literature
in comparison with flaming combustion. An experimental study was conducted
to characterize the initiation of smoldering and flaming combustion
of biomass using temporal and spatial temperature profiles, mass loss
profiles, and gas analyses. The results show that the peak temperature,
temperature rise rate, and average mass loss rate of flaming combustion
are much higher than those of smoldering combustion. The results on
the ratio of CO to CO2 for flaming and smoldering combustion
show good agreement with the data reported in the literature. The
results also show that smoldering combustion can be initiated only
under a low air flow; for the experimental apparatus used, this corresponded
to flow velocity of ≤38.1 mm·s–1. A
combustion progress pathway diagram was developed that describes the
stages of smoldering and flaming combustion of a single dry biomass
particle. An analysis of combustion kinetic parameters (activation
energy and pre-exponential factor) and an energy balance analysis
were also conducted to understand the differences between smoldering
and flaming combustion.
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