The Sustainability of Academic Air Mobility in Finnish Universities

Abstract

With the simultaneous rise of concern about the climate crisis and the growing internationalization of research institutions, academic mobility poses an “academic paradox”: knowledge of the environmental harm of aviation does not necessarily translate into action. Universities must make changes to their mobility habits if they wish to comply with governmental carbon neutrality targets and lead with example. This research looks at Finland’s 14 universities and identifies the patterns and trends of academic mobility from a series of reports provided by the universities and their travel agencies. Moreover, we mapped the travel destinations to understand the scope of Finnish academic travel. The data revealed that Finnish universities are in different states of sustainability: some acting as clear trendsetters and others lagging. The results show that although the universities are performing well in some areas, as in preferring European destinations over intercontinental ones, there are still areas of improvement related to stopover reduction, the number of 1- and 2-day trips, and alternative transport forms to aviation. There is also a need for the standardization of targets and emission calculators. These key development areas are posed as recommendations through which the universities could easily reduce the carbon footprint of their mobility.

Reducing air travel emissions in academia: an exploration of universities’ manoeuvring room

“…Common measures tend to avoid penalising or restricting flying. While some universities only use carbon offsetting, others actively incentivise alternatives to air travel by intensifying technical support and training for videoconferencing (VC), providing state-of-the-art software for VC, giving recommendations on sustainable travel and the use of VC, providing guidelines on how to travel sustainably and covering costs for premium rail tickets for long train journeys (Ahonen et al , 2021; Hoolohan et al , 2021; Kreil and Stauffacher, 2021; Glover et al , 2018; Getzinger, 2020; Schmidt, 2022). Furthermore, most institutions taking steps to reduce air travel emissions are monitoring their air travel emissions and many have defined reduction targets (Kreil and Stauffacher, 2021).…”

Understanding the Gap between University Ambitions to Teach and Deliver Climate Change Education

“…This may well be a challenge if the future of higher education leads to disciplinary boundaries disappearing, requiring educators to embrace inter-, trans-and cross-disciplinarity teaching [27]. Further, although the mobility habits of universities must change to comply with government carbon neutrality targets and to manage reputation [28], few academics willingly reduce their air travel [9]. Such unwillingness is caused by perceptions that professional academic success will be impacted, despite research suggesting otherwise [29].…”

Exploring the Problem Space of CO2 Emission Reductions from Academic Flying

“…Flying is in fact one of the largest sources of CO 2 emissions at a research-intensive university, and flying is most certainly the single largest source of CO 2 emissions for any researcher who flies regularly. The topic of academic flying is nowadays being discussed more often and a number of different studies have examined specific aspects such as the carbon footprint of an academic conference [15], the carbon footprint of shifting academic conferences to online [16][17][18], the carbon footprint of a research paper [19], the carbon footprint of a research project [20][21][22], the carbon footprint of a research lab [23,24], the carbon footprint in specific academic disciplines [25][26][27] and the carbon footprint of a university [28][29][30][31]. A large-scale cooperative effort in France is developing an set of open-source tools to calculate the carbon footprint of a research laboratory (which typically has tens or at most a few hundred members) ( [32], see also [33]).…”