Curtailing Air Travel CO2 Emissions: A Case Study of Imperial College London

Abstract

As UK educational institutions strive to address air travel emissions arising from business travel and include the Scope 3 emissions within their sustainable strategies, Imperial College London has developed a Sustainability Strategy that aims to reduce 25% of air travel by 2026 (from the baseline year of 2017-2018) through the introduction of a college-wide travel policy for academics and researchers. However, the compliance of this travel policy with the academic staff of specific departments is unknown, possibly resulting in the policies failure to meet the target. Here the paper shows the opinions of the academic staff of the Chemical Engineering Department (CED) regarding the new travel policy, highlighting the key perceptions, their trust in the policy, and possible incentives that can promote acquiescence. Through the use of a mixed-methods approach including a quantitative, qualitative, and SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, this thesis presented findings that enabled an evaluation of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the travel policy, as well as recommendations that can improve academic acceptability. The findings demonstrated a mixed attitude among the CED academics regarding the travel policy, with many demonstrating a willingness to abide by the policy, therefore removing the need to entirely amend it. However, numerous concerns were raised, especially regarding target clarity, equality, data transparency for individual CO2e emissions, and the impact on collaboration and networking, especially for early career-researchers. To overcome these challenges and instigate behavioral change, a set of recommendations was brought forward to aid the policymakers, suggesting refining and including certain incentives that attract emission reduction behaviour. The author of this thesis anticipates that by abiding by these recommendations, Imperial can successfully incentive academics through behaviour change to reduce air travel emissions to the aforementioned target and aid the Sustainability Strategy, helping to promote travel policies for other educational institutions through combined action. This thesis can therefore be a starting point for more sophisticated evaluations of individual departmental opinions regarding sustainable policies in the future, assisting educational institutions across the UK in identifying the biggest threats to policy compliance and ways to mitigate them.