# Airborne in the era of climate change [Letter]

Kévin Jean, Chris Wymant

► To cite this version:

Kévin Jean, Chris Wymant. Airborne in the era of climate change [Letter]. Science, 2019, 363 (6424), pp.240.2-240. 10.1126/science.aaw1145. hal-02075986

HAL Id: hal-02075986

https://hal.science/hal-02075986v1

Submitted on 10 Feb 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# Airborne in the era of climate change

*Author's version: the editor's version can be found at: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6424/240.2*

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its special report on limiting global warming to 1.5°C (1). The IPCC's 2050 target of carbon neutrality is strongly challenged by sectors with unavoidable emissions, such as aviation. Forecasts of the sector's growth predict that by 2050 it could have consumed up to one quarter of the total global carbon budget for 1.5°C (2). The absence of substantial technical gains in aircraft emissions implies that reduction of aviation impact will be unfeasible without a decrease in demand (3). Air travel contributes substantially to the carbon footprint of academic communities (4), despite calls to travel less (5). In the current academic system, avoiding flying means accepting tradeoffs, such as greater challenges to collaboration and networking. However, the cost of inaction and business as usual is the growing global threat of climate change, and scientists, given the alarms they regularly raise, should model responsible behavior to the planet. To encourage low-impact mobility, scientific institutions should adopt an avoid-mitigate-compensate approach similar to that developed in ecosystem conservation (6).

To avoid unnecessary journeys, institutions, department heads, and principal investigators should encourage scientists to consider or provide alternatives, such as teleconferencing and virtual scientific conferences. To mitigate emissions resulting from travel, scientists who must travel should replace flights with cleaner modes of travel as much as possible. Participants should prioritize local meetings, and organizers should reduce distances traveled by choosing central locations. To compensate for travel, scientists should financially contribute to credible and traceable projects for reducing and removing carbon emissions. This should be the last resort, given the questionable effectiveness of carbon offsetting (7).

There is increasing discussion about the best way to evaluate scientists, teams, and research projects (8), and including a carbon sobriety criterion could be a good way to reduce scientists' carbon footprint. Individual involvement is crucial, but supportive institutional environments [e.g., (9)] are also required to incentivize carbon-neutral behavior at the scale and speed required. Institutions invariably have policies for preventing and reducing harm, which address problems such as physical safety and data security. Surely the protection of planetary health, through the dramatic carbon cuts that are now urgently required, has a place in institutional policy, too.

Kévin Jean¹,²* and Chris Wymant³

¹Laboratoire MESuRS, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France. ²Unité PACRI, Institut Pasteur, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France. ³Big Data Institute, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

*Corresponding author. Email: kevin.jean@lecnam.net

## REFERENCES

1. "Global Warming of 1.5°C" (IPCC, 2018); www.ipcc.ch/sr15.

2. "Analysis: Aviation could consume a quarter of 1.5C carbon budget by 2050," *Carbon Brief* (2016); www.carbonbrief.org/aviation-consume-quarter-carbon-budget.

3. A. Macintosh, L. Wallace, *Energ. Pol.* **37**, 264 (2009).

4. A. Stohl, *Atmos. Chem. Phys.* **8**, 6499 (2008).

5. X. Anglaret, *Lancet Planet Health* **2**, e382 (2018).

6. "An integrated framework and guidelines for avoiding, mitigating, and compensating for wetland losses: Resolution XI.9" (Ramsar Convention, 2012); www.ramsar.org/sites/default/files/documents/library/cop11-res09-e.pdf.

7. K. Hyams, T. Fawcett, *Wiley Interdisc. Rev.: Clim. Change* **4**, 91 (2013).

8. D. Moher *et al.*, *PLOS Biol.* **16**, e2004089 (2018).

9. Tyndall Centre, "Tyndall Travel Strategy—towards a culture of low carbon research for the 21st Century" (2014); https://tyndall.ac.uk/travel-strategy.