Credible science

It’s a conflict we all know, but one that particularly plagues environmental scientists: Air travel allows researchers to participate in international projects, to discuss problems face to face. At the same time, however, it causes harm to the climate and our environment. It’s a classic dilemma, and solving it requires creativity and a little sacrifice. A personal experiment.

A question of credibility

At the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, the international community committed to a fundamental social change. This will require new kinds of credibility and facts. Scientists will be judged on whether they can live up to their own claims for radical solutions. Flying is a good testing ground for this question: public awareness is already there, technical solutions are unlikely. Giving up air travel requires innovation on the part of the scientific community.

The ongoing experiment

I had a slow start with flying. Before I graduated, I had never even set foot in an airplane, nor did I have a driver’s license. That was nothing unusual at the time – at least not for an environmental science student.

Fifteen years later, I have travelled around the world for work at least ten times, I have flown regularly to other continents, and I have a driver’s license in three different countries. Again, that’s nothing unusual these days, not even for an environmental scientist.

Five years ago, I decided to give up air travel. I like to travel and I don’t like to change my way of life. So it would be convenient if I could say that it is impossible for a researcher to give up flying. But that is not the case. It is indeed possible to fly less or not at all – sometimes there are even benefits.

Firstly: find practical solutions

Simple practical measures are often sufficient to avoid air travel. Sharing information online works well, especially with longstanding partners. I have attended conferences online, replaced intercontinental travel with travel within Europe, and I frequently watch presentations as videocasts. For many years, I have written publications with colleagues I never meet, while fieldwork in a foreign country can be organized by local researchers in the field. Admittedly, however, it is difficult to build trust for new partnerships from scratch without a face-to-face meeting.

Thanks to the Corona break, however, we learned how well videoconferencing and other virtual media work. And we got an idea of what else might be possible if we continue to develop these technologies, learn to use them better, and make virtual interactions part of everyday working life.

Secondly: the grass is always greener… 

As students, our main concern on Monday morning was realising that we were at the wrong party on Saturday night. This is something economists call opportunity costs: the costs of missed opportunities. If you only focus on what you’re giving up, you don’t see all the benefits of not flying. I gained time, and I experienced many new things. For example through the train window: taking the night train to an advisory board meeting in Lisbon was a charming experience. By doing so, I contributed to a terran infrastructure: night trains in Europe.

With my terran experiment, I saved time – instead of losing time, because I cancelled (or virtually replaced) air travel and used travel time in a variety of ways (instead of sitting around in airports). I can work very well on the train like focusing on writing a text. For me, travelling terran always means observational learning as a basis for my research and teaching.

Thirdly: Keeping your feet on the ground

Air travel affects the way we do science. Not flying has led my research to increasingly focus on real, local problems in my local environment. This means that I collaborate with colleagues from other disciplines and practitioners here in Switzerland. And that’s exactly why I find non-flying exciting – it spurs me to rethink my role as a scientist in solving environmental problems.

I think it’s better to fly less and instead tackle real, thorny issues more vigorously. I think it’s better to deal with your own problems than to explain them to others – even if you don’t get credit for it. I think it is better to train scientists from less developed countries instead of considering ourselves as indispensable experts.

The real challenge

Our society has somehow forgotten how to debate alternative lifestyles and social utopias. In my view, (technical) universities are partly responsible for the paralyzing lack of discussion and orientation in our society. This is because people here prefer to talk about technological breakthroughs rather than social change.

It is unlikely that new technologies will make air travel climate-neutral in the coming decades. Technological innovations and digitalization might offer solutions, but what we urgently need are social innovations: new ways of living and a green economy.

We are entering a crucial decade. If we want to radically reverse CO₂ emissions, resource consumption and species extinction, we need to talk about systemic change and the consequences for our everyday lives. Thirty years from now, we will be living in a fundamentally different world – still we have time to shape it.

I have always planned and communicated my being “terran” as an experiment. By doing so, I have focused on the opportunities and the new, rather than the loss; and allowed for failure and tolerance. For me, not flying is a self-experiment to better understand what innovation is in our time.

This terran story is based on blog articles published by Christoph Küffer at the ETH Zukunftsblog and stay-grounded.org. ETH Zurich has initiated a mobility platform that aims, among other things, to specifically address the dilemma of business air travel. The ‘Academic Flight Blog’ and ‘Fewer Flights to Academic Conferences’ are further initiatives to reduce the academic carbon footprint.