Responsible air travel

ETH Zurich is facing an all-too-familiar dilemma: researchers need to network and collaborate across borders, but air travel is bad for the world’s climate. As Ulrich Weidmann, Vice President for Human Resources and Infrastructure at ETH Zurich, remarks: “ETH Zurich is committed to sustainability, but the success of our researchers hinges on enabling them to collaborate internationally and providing them with the best possible development opportunities – it’s a typical conflict of interests.”

Air travel accounts for over 50 percent of the university’s CO₂ emissions, and technical solutions that could reduce air travel emissions to zero are still a long way off. “When it comes to CO₂ emissions, ETH Zurich is seen as a role model for society, so people watch what we do very closely,” Weidmann argues. That is why Weidmann launched an initiative in April 2017 encouraging people to take fewer flights. At the end of 2018, the Executive Board of ETH Zurich approved the academic departments’ comprehensive preparatory work and launched a university-wide air travel project at the start of 2019.

A new approach to air travel

But researchers collaborate in international projects and work in academic departments that are largely autonomous. So how do you win them over to this idea – especially at a university with an explicit strategy of internationalisation? Not by imposing directives from above, as Susann Görlinger anticipated from the start. She is co-lead of the mobility platform, a hub for mobility-related topics at ETH. The platform focuses on sustainable mobility on campus and also encompasses the air travel project led by Görlinger, which aims to change the way staff view air travel.

“We have to fully involve the target groups in a meaningful way if we want to establish a culture of responsible air travel,” says Görlinger. She insists that it has nothing to do with moralising or trying to discredit flying altogether, but is simply a means of encouraging everyone at ETH to get to grips with the problem. ETH Zurich has been pursuing a bottom-up approach based on participation and personal responsibility. Although the Executive Board did ask the academic departments to come up with ways to reduce the number of flights, it did not set any specific targets. As Görlinger emphasises: “It’s up to each individual to determine exactly how they wish to contribute. We’re neither prescribing nor prohibiting anything.”

A change in thinking

And yet, at least initially, there were a lot of objections from ETH staff, some of them quite strong. “At first there were quite a few misunderstandings and, in some cases, opposition, but we also received a lot of support – which continues to grow,” explains Görlinger. One and a half years and numerous workshops later, all of the academic departments and central administrative units are doing their bit. They have committed to reducing emissions by between 3 and 20 percent over the period 2019 to 2025, with an average reduction target of around 11 percent.

The departments have also defined the measures they will adopt to achieve their targets – from internal CO₂ taxes and the use of videoconferencing technology to incentives for rail travel and specific recommendations for avoiding short-haul and business-class flights. The majority of the academic departments have also decided to offset their flights. Offsetting is no substitute for a true reduction of air travel, and will not count as such – but it does represent an additional measure and interim solution.

Effective monitoring

During the preliminary phase, the departments were keen to have an effective monitoring system, which would allow individual professorships to track their emissions on an ongoing basis. They are currently working together with the mobility platform to establish a database for the years 2016 to 2018 that will be taken as the reference period. The database comprises all flights purchased by ETH Zurich for its staff and guests, plus student flights that form part of the curriculum.

Since January 2019, flight-related data can be entered directly into ETH Zurich’s resource and finance platform. Each professorship will receive monthly reports detailing the CO₂ emissions caused by their air travel.

The departments start begin reducing their emissions in 2019 and a mid-term evaluation will take place after three years. This ETH-wide change process will also be analysed in a dissertation. “That’s the plan – now it’s time to put it into action,” say Görlinger and Weidmann. They are additionally motivated by the fact that many other universities and organisations in Switzerland and abroad have started to take action and expressed an interest in what ETH is doing in terms of air travel. “That way society at large can benefit from our experiences as well,” says Weidmann.

This article first appeared in Globe magazine in a slightly modified version.