Decarbonizing Academic Air Travel: Policy, Finance, and Culture Change

Universities face significant challenges in addressing Scope 3 emissions from air travel, which is deeply intertwined with research, collaboration, global engagement, and career advancement.

This session brings together faculty and sustainability professionals from the University of California, San Francisco; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Maryland. The session will be organized around cross-cutting questions examining how universities measure air travel emissions, finance mitigation, and combine policy interventions with cultural change. Each institution will respond based on its own experience, enabling attendees to compare approaches, challenges, and lessons across different institutional contexts.

As the University of California works toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90%, it has launched a planning sprint to identify actionable strategies for reducing air travel emissions while supporting academic excellence and operational needs. UCSF will contribute a culture-change and academic-advancement perspective. Through a multi-phase initiative led by the Academic Senate Committee on Sustainability, UCSF engaged faculty, department chairs, and leaders from four schools to examine the role of travel in academic careers. The initiative explored impacts on work-life balance, inequitable access to travel opportunities, and uncertainty about the relationship between travel and career advancement. It also informed guidance clarifying that virtual and in-person presentations are evaluated equally and that multiple pathways can contribute to establishing a professional reputation.

UC Berkeley will share lessons from its Business Air Travel Carbon Mitigation Program, which assesses fees on air travel and reinvests the revenue in campus emissions-reduction initiatives. Its contribution will address automated fee collection across funding sources, sustainable-travel education, project selection, program administration, and efforts to capture activities that fall outside standard reimbursement systems.

The University of Maryland will share lessons from 15 years of air travel emissions tracking and eight years of offsetting experience. UMD will discuss emissions-estimation methods, data and reporting challenges, offset financing and project selection, and the limitations of offsets as a long-term strategy. It will also highlight emerging approaches involving departmental engagement, partnerships with campus offices, sustainable aviation fuel education, lower-carbon travel guidance, and potential institutional policies and procedures.

Presenters will compare opportunities, tradeoffs, implementation barriers, and lessons learned, helping attendees identify practical ways to integrate measurement, financing, policy, and culture change into effective institutional strategies for addressing air travel emissions.