Quantifying the greenhouse gas impact of university air travel: an applied analysis

Purpose The urgency of climate change and an evolving greenhouse gas reporting environment has reinforced the need to better understand greenhouse gas emissions associated with business travel. This study aims to demonstrate how universities can help ground-truth greenhouse gas accounting concepts and identify pathways for emission reductions. Design/methodology/approach The authors explore the travel preferences and behaviors of the North Carolina State University community through an in-house electronic survey, automate travel data collection and analysis, create a custom Web-based engine to recommend lower emission itineraries and identify policies and practices to further reduce emissions. Findings A campus survey suggested opportunities to increase awareness of sustainable travel planning options, but also limits to willingness to undertake substantial changes. The authors identified opportunities for data automation and use of less conservative estimation approaches, leading to staff time savings and lower calculated emissions. Practical implications Reexamining emissions estimation process, including new forms of existing data, surveying the campus community and leveraging open-source artificial intelligence tools, suggests improvements to travel emissions estimation and reporting processes, relatively quickly, at low upfront cost and with potential long-term savings. The revised approach achieved a 5% reduction in estimated air travel emissions while saving 15 h of staff time annually. Further near-term emissions reductions face individual, institutional and interinstitutional challenges. Originality/value Though examples of university emissions reporting exist in the gray and peer-reviewed literature, this analysis connects travel preferences and behavior with novel data analysis techniques to leverage existing data and suggest opportunities for improving greenhouse gas estimation and reduction efforts routinely faced in higher education.