Academics tackle climate change?! - who can help?

Hi Bettina!

I have been working for the past 4 years on Wind Energy related technical problems with my research, so allow myself to weigh in about your nice initiative.

I do understand and share your concern, I do. But consider that Researchers are a tiny percentage of the totality of passengers, and researchers who are required to travel to conference an even smaller percentage (like us marie curies). Although these activities are always a nice platform to share ideas, nothing in my humble opinion is comparable to a conference where you get to meet in person people who influence your research and career (it's not only about sharing and updating the research I think).

Compared to buying lemons coming from South Africa, Uranium coming from Canada, or using electric heating, the carbon footprint of a researcher travelling to a conference is negligible.

I think we shouldn't beat ourselves up, especially considering the disastrous personal conditions academia forces researchers to be in, without stability or job security, and considering that in society's great picture there are other issues which we as researchers should instead focus on, like convincing the public on the absurdity of some of our progress and innovation outcomes, like as I said the products we use every day or the energy policy which is not at all discussed about in politics.

Actually, your idea is indeed nice for people who don't have the luxury of having benchfees to fly to conferences to have the opportunity of criticism to their work, which I think is at the base of our work.

All the best with your research and initiative!

King Regards,

Giulio

I completely agree with Giulio.

I would also like to add that the issue of climate change is, to my opinion, more an economic rather than a scientific problem.  It is more than thirty years that the scientific community is warning the political and the economic world about the climate change and many technological solutions are avilable now.

What academia could do is to make available solutions for data collection (such as, for example, the existing tree-talker) or suggest innovative solutions for lowering the carbon emissions, but, ultimately, I have the impression that we can't do much more.

For sure, limiting travels for scientific purposes, will not impact significantly on the climate, also because the aircraft would leave anyway even if a bunch of scientists are not on board. On the contrary the scientific community would dramatically suffer the limitation of personal contacts in terms of innovative ideas and professional collaborations.

Best regards,

Vincenzo 

Hi Everyone,

This is a really important topic, and I am interested to hear other people's thoughts on what we can do as researchers to help with the climate change idea. 

Whilst webinars and skype based conference presentations are a good idea, for early career researchers they prevent you from actually spending time with other researchers, and having the same kind of conversations that you would have at a conference, as others in this thread have pointed out. Avoiding air travel would be a good way to try and reduce the impact of attending conference. A main limitation of this is that employers/universities  won't allow researchers to take additional time travlelling to and from conference using slower methods of transportation such as trains and ferries (even though work can be completed in transit). Perhaps we can try to put more pressure on companies to allow this to happen more often to reduce air travel.

On a completely different issue I'm reeally interested in lab sustainability. I would love to hear form anyone that has successfully employed lab recycling, and re-using of lab materials and equimpment that typically would get thrown away. So many places throw away test tubes etc, when in reality with good cleaning methadologies it should be possible to reuse them. I appreciate there are still many scientific bits of equipment that for contamination purposes cannot be cleaned thoroughly and reused, but I am very interested to hear strategies people have used to try and make labs a bit more sustainable.

Best Wishes

Jennifer 

Hi all,

Thanks Bettina for raising this important question, and for taking the initiative to make changes in academia. TwinLabs sounds like a good idea!  What specific functions, absent from other social media for researchers (like researchgate), would TwinLabs present? I do not have any skills in developping websites, so I unfortunately cannot provide any material support for this.

I completely agree with you Bettina about the massive environmental footprint of flying to conferences. I also did the maths of the greenhouse gases of my academic travel, and I got scared, and also a bit ashamed to tell the truth. I realised that even though I try to have a sustainable lifestyle, my carbon footprint was much larger than the average European citizen, itself much larger to what it should be in order to have a chance to keep global warming below 2C. Of course, as pointed out by Giulio and Vincenzo, the carbon emissions of one person are irrelevant, but I don't think it is a good enough reason for doing nothing about it (see here, for example, on how individual actions can have an impact: https://lili.leeds.ac.uk/news/an-audacious-toolkit-actions-against-climate-breakdown-part-3-i-is-for-individual/). There is a conversation to be had on the equity in reduction of greenhouse gases emissions, and I strongly believe that the largest emitters, and that includes business people and academics, should make a correspondingly large effort for reducing their environmental footprint.

Personnally, I have decided to stop flying, and only time will say how long I will manage to keep this resolution. Obviously this implies to be able to spend more money and more time on travel, and to choose carefully the events I go to. It worked in my previous position as a Marie Curie PhD student, but I am not sure all PI and all universities will accept that. For the latter, I think universities can be convinced that to reduce their operative greenhouse gases emissions, they have to encourage the slow travel of their academics, this is (partially) the case at the University of Edinburgh for example.

There are some initiatives about academic travel if you are interested. The University of Edinburgh is leading an international roundtable on Sustainable Academic Travel (https://businesstravelroundtable.ac/) with people from 55 institutions, maybe you can join in. If you are on twitter, have a look at @flyingless who is also trying to gather academics about this issue (the associated blog: https://academicflyingblog.wordpress.com/).

As Jennifer says, there is more to sustainability in academia than travel, and I would also be very interested in what can be done in the lab. I have no experience in trying to reduce my lab waste, but I think that we have room for improvement considering the amount of consumables we use.

In my opinion, there is a third point on which academics can be a force for good for the unavoidable ecological transition: by their choice of research topics. I think that we should be given more time to think about the consequences of our research, especially for those of use who are on the side of applied science. In materials science for example, what is the raw material of the material I am working on? How abundant is it? How much energy will I need to put it in its material form? And then how much energy to process it into a usable component? What will happen of it at its end of life? I find that generally, we are trapped in a narrow idea of innovation, for example new materials need to perform better, to be more functional, etc, but there are other aspects that we need to take into account. It is very difficult because we are collectively trapped in this mindset, together with research funding agencies and our colleagues who may review our grant applications. I guess what I am trying to say, ultimately, is that there is something inherently political in the way we do science (polemical statement, I know), and maybe we should try to change it if we don't like it.

I am keen to discuss about the wider topic of Sustainability & Academia more in detail in a skype meeting, if anyone else is!

Best regards,
Marion

Hi All,

I am currently vice-chair of the Policy Working Group of the Marie Curie Alumni Association.

I am very interested in your discussion on sustainable research practice, since we are considering to make this a policy priority for the coming year. The idea would be to develop something like a 'Researcher Green Deal'. There are a lot of ideas in this discussion that could contribute. Therefore it would be really helpful if:
- you would be willing to share with the policy working group any outcomes of your discussions, should you discuss over Skype, so that this can feed into the policy work as a member input
- any of you who would be interested to contribute to this project could contact me (stroobantskaren@gmail.com) so that I can connect you with the chair of the Policy Working Group (do note that many people have expressed interest to contribute and we can only adopt so many members - that being said, the project task force for sustainable research practice will need considerable reinforcement so we'd be very happy to know about MCAA members with an interest to join)

Many thanks,

Karen

Thank you every one for your feedback and interest in the topic. 

For those who are not too sure about their impact or my suggestion, I understand. It is difficult to see that small things like this could make a difference. I agree, it would probably not be sufficient, but my hope is that small turns into big and that this will have an impact. So many things in history have started small and eventually became big, that's why I am hoping to get enough people involved on the TwinLabs project. I think it will have multiple benefits for academics that go above and beyond climate change, because it has the potential to foster connection and collaboration and knowledge exchange. 

So if anyone would like to join and/or contribute I am happy to hear from you. I would also be very grateful if people would be available to test the prototype of the platform, once it is build. 

Thank you and happy new year.

PS: for anyone interested, here is a nice article: https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/fly-or-die-academia

Best, 

Bettina