Throwing out the Baby with the Bathwater
#Flyless and Academic Conferences
The popular call to #flyless to academic conferences is throwing out the baby with the bathwater: It employs a limited understanding of academic conferences, it ignores the operational realities, and there are unintended consequences.
Over the past 13 years, I have been responsible as conference manager or in a similar senior role for about a dozen large international academic conferences and numerous smaller conferences and workshops, mainly related to earth system governance. I also participated in a dozen conferences and workshops by third parties each year.
A general awareness of the environmental impact of conferences already influenced some of my decisions in conference design and operations at the beginning of this period — for example by offering vegetarian catering options as the default rather than as “dietary requirement”, or by avoiding single use plastics. However, the recently surging call to #flyless, if taken seriously, requires more than just operational tinkering to conferences. It will require a transformative change of the academic system of which conferences are a central element.
Let me be clear from the start: I would welcome the operational challenge and, with some caveats, consider a transformation of the academic system as an exciting endeavor. However, for as long as academia functions the way it does, the call to #flyless ignores reality, and the operational implications are significant and come with unintended consequences.
#flyless uses a limited understanding of academic conferences
Often, #flyless advocates suggest (usually formulated as a demand) to present their paper remotely through video link in order to avoid greenhouse gas emissions which their in-person presentation would cause. Presenting a paper is an important part of attending an academic conference, often the activity that unlocks the funding for participation in and travel to a conference. But it is not the only part.
Conferences are also opportunities to discuss research (and much more) in the corridors, in the infamous long lines for the coffee, in the haphazardly thrown together company for a dinner, thus well beyond the formal questions and answers at the end of a presentation. Conferences are bazaars to exchange new ideas and meet researchers in other empiric fields, from other universities, other countries, and with other worldviews. Thereby, conferences enrich the thinking and advance the opportunities of the individual researcher as well as the interconnectedness and dissemination of knowledge in the epistemological community of the conference. Obviously, not all conferences succeed in this, but that does not allow for simplistically equating a conference with just the presentation of a paper.
To be blunt, if someone attends a conference just to present a paper, they are anyway wasting time and resources and thus better stay home and #flyless anyway.
Attending fewer conferences is often suggested as another way to #flyless. This seems prudent, not just in terms of emission reductions, but also in light of the high workload and often precarious and low levels of funding in academia. The problem here is the way many advocates of #flyless seem to select conferences to attend. That is, by optimizing towards the emission reduction target only hence ditching relevant valuable conferences that require flying in favor of less relevant conferences that can be reached by other means of transportation, or minimizing conference attendance at times when their individual career or the dissemination of new ideas or findings (and thereby the advancement of the field as such) would benefit from a more dense conferencing schedule.
To be blunt, if someone attends a conference that adds no value to their career or the field of research, they are anyway wasting time and resources and thus better stay home and #flyless anyway.
In other words, the balance sheet of attending a conference is much more complicated than emissions on the one side and a presentation on the other side.
#flyless over-estimates the availability of technological solutions
Amazing technology exist for video-connections between locations, combined with file-sharing, chat functions, and much more; some solutions even including mobile robots that enable the remote participant to roam the conference venue and interact virtually with other participants. So cool!
But, for most of the regular academic conferences, remote presentation currently entails a stressed student-volunteer fiddling around with a laptop and with the audio-settings on skype, causing delays before the often equally stressed remote participant shows up in low resolution video with poor audio (if they get audio to work at all), often unable to split screens so that one can see presenter and slides at the same time, and with all kind of unrelated notifications popping up on screen.
Online streaming of keynote speakers meanwhile goes a bit smoother due to common social media platforms having made tremendous progress in recording and streaming video through means of widely available (and affordable!) cell-phone technology. Here, the issue is more the gap between stated interest in and demand for live-streaming or recording of keynote presentations and the actual watching of the video. The few times I experimented with this, despite solid marketing, the remote audience numbers never exceeded 5% of audience in the room, and the ex-post viewing numbers were negligible — making the entire effort futile.
It is easy to demand recording or live-streaming of keynotes, and remote presentation, and make that a moral imperative by adding the #flyless hashtag. But, if that demand does not go hand in hand with a willingness to actually watch the video (even at inconvenient hours due to time-zone differences), or to understand the configurations and set-up of the remote presentation platform ahead of time, there is no operational incentive for conference organizers and no added value for the overall conference to invest time and resources in a live-stream or recording, and remote presentations will remain clumsy.
I strongly believe in technological progress and am confident that sooner than later, there will be better options for remote participation. Until then however, the existence of appropriate technology does not mean that it is available and affordable, or even feasible for an academic conference.
There are also new forms of virtual academic gathering, sharing of knowledge, and building networks, and even building a community, that are made possible by new technologies. For example, some of my former colleagues started a Slack based community on anticipatory governance, including webinars, document sharing, and an ongoing discussion. These new formats require no flying, and have the potential to over time replace at least some conferences.
In 2016, in my role as executive director of the Earth System Governance Project, I was conference manager of the 2016 Nairobi Conference. In line with the tradition of the conference series, this conference took place at the campus of the hosting university — the actual place of work of the local colleagues — and not in a convenient conference hotel or at the compound of an international organization there. This local embedding and interaction with the students and other faculty on campus is crucial for a valuable exchange of knowledge and mutual learning, especially for the social sciences. But, there was no wireless internet (among many other things one usually take for granted at a venue). So, we invested in setting-up a Wi-Fi-network on campus to enable our conference participants to have a basic level of access to email, social media, and whatever else they needed for an effective participation — and yes, we kept the infrastructure in place after the conference providing a lasting value for all students on campus. But, investing in this basic technology already did put a huge stress on the budget. To have appropriate technology for remote participation in place would have required registration fees well above the means of most researchers, or moving the conference to a venue not representing the local context.
#flyless over-estimates the availability of logistical alternatives
Often, #flyless advocates suggest using other means of transportation than the airplane. Based on the large numbers of selfies and tweets from them in a train on their way to or from a conference, the willingness to walk the talk in this regard seems high (different from the above noted unwillingness to watch video or properly prepare for remote presentations). However, the train as a more environmental friendly mode of transportation is only available to researchers in, and for travel between, a few places in the world, notably in Europe.
I wrote the first draft of this text in an airplane from Amsterdam to Berlin. Because I prefer train over airplane (for reasons of convenience and effectiveness of working as well as for environmental reasons), I initially looked for a train connection. Despite Amsterdam and Berlin being major European capitals, the train connecting them runs in a low frequency, uses worn out carriages, takes well over 6 hours for just over 600 kilometers, usually has air-conditioning issues, has a catering services that does not accept common credit cards (if electronic payment works at all), has no Wi-Fi-service, etc. This is not an alternative.
This example shows that even in the best region of the world in terms of railway infrastructure and service, and the laudable fact that there is a good number of cities served by fast and convenient trains, the train still is not a commonly available alternative mode of transportation. Not even between all major capitals, and certainly not for towns in the periphery. And, in Europe, where many cities are connected by fast and convenient trains, the costs of train tickets are usually well above those of the flight, as is the time needed to make the journey.
Is this extra time and cost worth the reduction of emissions? Time and resources are not abundant in academia and the trade-off will require tailored solutions for each individual researcher and for each conference. The #flyless movement would do well to not add shame of flying into this already complicated equation, and recognize that alternative modes of transportation are not available everywhere and that the costs (including time) are not affordable for everyone.
#Flyless ignores operational realities of conferences
In order to remotely participate in a conference there needs to be a conference in the first place. Even if all participants would be remote participants, that is, an entirely virtual conference (something I would very much like to experiment with), there needs to be a conference in the sense of infrastructure, organisation, schedule, content, communication, and so much more. Organizing and implementing a conference comes at cost. In general, and certainly for the conferences I managed, catering is one of the largest items on the budget. Remote participants thus significantly reduces the variable costs — even when factoring in the relative higher per participant pre-conference time and communication efforts for remote participants versus regular participants. The expenses for the technological platforms and arrangements throughout the conference venue cause a notable increase of fixed costs. The ratio between fixed and variable costs varies quite a bit depending on the overall arrangements and financial structures of a conference, as do the resulting registration fees. For the dozen or so conferences I was responsible for, it was on average about 50/50.
Because it is virtual, it is not for free!
With an average registration fee for these conferences of just below 300 Euro, a remote presentation would require a registration fee of about 150 euro. The costs for watching a live-streaming of a keynote would depend on the number of viewers and could range anywhere from a few cents up to something like 20 euro — but a case can be made that free live-streaming of keynotes is valuable marketing for a conference hence could be made available for free.
Over the past ten years, I have asked numerous conference participants about their willingness to pay for a remote presentation and participation. Interestingly, in sharp contrast to their general willingness to invest substantial additional time and resources in alternative modes of transportation, the willingness to pay was limited, and the reason for having to pay often not immediately understood. And that although in person participation would not only be more expensive in terms of registration fees but would also come with costs for transportation and accommodation. My survey included a large number of conference participants over the years. Thus, while not scientifically representative, it is telling and more than anecdotal.
#Flyless inadvertently could hamper other (rather important) objectives
An optimization of conference attendance solely towards the emission reduction goal — which essentially is what #flyless demands — will have unintended consequences. Not having alternative means of transportation available or affordable should not keep large groups of researchers away from conferences. Not having technological solutions available or affordable should not cause many venues to be excluded from hosting conferences.
Without wanting to go in depth into the issue of diversity in research, which I think is overall a much more pressing concern for academia than the need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions caused by academia, it needs to be pointed out that #flyless and #diversity constitute a conflicting double demand (very often voiced by the same researchers) on conference organizers. If taken seriously, #flyless requires more than just operational tinkering to conferences (sometimes leading to the absurd paradoxical solution to fly in scholars from certain underrepresented regions while having to accommodate the absence or remote participation of others). It will require a transformative change of the academic system. That will take a lot of time, effort, and courage. In the meantime, technological innovation will progress rapidly and make remote participation more convenient, affordable, and idiot-proof. In the meantime, more and more places will be connected to alternative modes of transportation. But:
At a time in which fast progress in science, and the generation of high-quality cutting-edge scientific knowledge is more crucial than ever in order to address the urgent and daunting challenges of sustainability and climate change — and as a matter of fact many other pressing societal problems — we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If attending a conference is beneficial to the career of a researcher, or adds real value to the advancement of the field of science, than #flyless should not stand in the way of in-person conference attendance!