Sustainable Travel Hackathon: Ideas and Solutions for a Greener UofG

In this post Elizabeth Adams, Researcher Development Manager, reflects on the ideas and solutions for more sustainable business travel at UofG that emerged from the Sustainable Travel Hackathon and discusses how the University is putting together sustainability guidance.

Last year, UofG recognised a climate emergency and recently put out a draft climate change strategy, to consult on priorities, strategies and targets to address this.

Looking at the data on the University’s carbon footprint, around 20% of it comes from business travel. There’s a Sustainability working group who will be looking at things like large scale targets and timelines, but business travel felt like something tangible that we could get a hold of and act on now.

So, led by Sally Wyke (Dean of Research in the College of Social Science and expert on behaviour change) and Tanita Casci (Head of Research Policy), a short-term working group was formed to draw up some guidance for colleagues. The group benefitted from input from academic and professional services (Procurement, Sustainability and Equality & Diversity) colleagues with related expertise and also practical experience. The University’s Social and Public Health Sciences unit in particular has already made progress in this area, creating an environmental policy for staff.

There will be open consultation meetings later this year that you should keep an eye out for in order to get more information.

We also held a Hackathon on 14 January to get perspectives from other members of the university.

Why the Hackathon?

One of the main things we wanted to avoid with environmental policy was establishing guidance that actually disadvantages people who are already disadvantaged for other reasons. For example, if we decree that no one is to fly within the UK, what does that mean for people with caring responsibilities who might not be able to be away from home overnight?

We knew that a lot of people were enthusiastic and already trialling new policies and guidance locally – such as conducting job interviews by Skype in the first round and only inviting a couple of people to attend in person at a later stage. For the Sustainable Travel Hackathon, we wanted to bring these people and perspectives together, along with other interested parties, to provide input on the new guidance.

Around 30 participants attended the Hackathon, from PGRs to senior professors, with a good gender balance and mix of professional services and academic colleagues. We worked in small groups to come up with creative solutions themed around 5 fictitious personae who were travelling for research. These personae were an amalgamation of people I’ve met and situations I’ve seen over the past few years, from Centres for Doctoral Training split across several sites, international development projects and researchers undertaking travel for fieldwork with complex circumstances. The aim was for these to help us fully explore some barriers and challenges to reducing travel or flying, as well as focus on the alternatives.

I think this event won the prize for ‘most bicycles’ in the room (Bromptons), never mind most bicycle helmets.

In just 2 hours, our participants came up with a large number of solutions and suggestions for how the University could help to promote greener alternatives, ranging from finding ways to help people get work done on the train (writing retreats, dongles to overcome rubbish wifi, and first class train tickets) to not travelling at all and coming up with more innovative ways to hold conferences or meetings using technology. All the solutions, suggestions, and practical resources that were cited have been fed into the working group.

One of the key issues will of course be balancing the time and workloads of busy individuals and any environmental policy. This will take clear guidance and information on the different ‘costs’ of various travel options. But more importantly, it will take leadership, examples of how things might be done differently, and line managers or supervisors being prepared to have conversations with staff or students to help them weigh up the value of travel.

The new guidance, due to be released in the summer, will build on work being done across UofG and the wider higher education sector. Some of the beacons of good practice we considered include Flyingless, The Tyndall Centre (who have a great decision making tree) and ETH Zurich. One of the things I am most looking forward to is the opportunity to really make technology work for us in this space because doing so not only has environmental benefits but also major positives in terms of health, work-life balance and inclusivity (because some people just really struggle to be able to travel, for many reasons).

The EPSRC-funded Visnet project is one to watch. They’ve been learning from industry partners about which tools work for remote collaborations, and the introduction of remote participation technology will link in with the new campus development. We’ll even be piloting the use of some pretty cool telepresence robots over the summer to deliver a seminar series. I hope we’ll be able to pilot some of these new technologies soon with PGRs at UofG, and at the same time, address the issue of researchers based off campus or with disabilities feeling less able to engage in events in person.

With a new Centre for Sustainable Solutions due to launch at UofG this year, we hope to see more of these partnerships between researchers and professional services staff, to try to tackle some of the larger environmental issues that the University is facing. 

We would love to hear from you if you have suggestions on this topic or an example of how things might be done differently that work well in practice. Get in touch with Elizabeth Adams and look out for the new guidance coming soon.

And a big thank you to Ivano Bongiovanni for helping me to design the hackathon process.