Impactful, Non-Travel Climate Actions for Federation and Membership Organizations
by Erik Shell
The passing of the one-year anniversary of pandemic lockdowns heralds the obligatory retrospective on the switch from in-person to virtual conferences by both federation and membership organizations. These meetings were how many of the oldest scholarly organizations got their start, and one full calendar year means that most all of us have experienced at least one entirely virtual meeting of our members.
While many changes were necessary to accommodate this new normal, one common theme emerged in the discourse: A virtual meeting, by its very nature, is one that required significantly fewer climate-harming emissions. Where before we saw thousands of round-trip flights and carpools into a typically large and gridlocked city, the newly virtual meeting space requires (to oversimply the situation) only the carbon emissions required to produce coffee and pajama pants.
Yet while the virtual shift typically pulled many other positive outcomes along with it (reduced attendance fees, greater access across geographical borders, increased accessibility options), and since it’s looking more and more like hybrid meetings are our future for the post-pandemic landscape, we run the risk of assuming that a virtual or hybrid meeting with fewer flights is the only thing we can do as membership organizations to make a measurable impact on climate change. Though we may think of our operations as largely low-carbon already, when we have less than a decade to curtail the most irreparable damage that climate change has in store then eliminating a singular, high-carbon practice is simply not enough.
Here I highlight three beginning steps that would turn federation organizations like the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) from passive actors to frontline fighters in the climate battle already underway. Not only would these actions show that the member societies of this country are taking the existential threat of climate change seriously, but it would also signal to the scientific community that they have allies in perhaps unexpected places, and demonstrate to the world that everyone must be involved in this fight if we are to win it.
The Climate Grants
There has been a growing movement of third-party organizations offering societies like ours the option to purchase carbon offsets. These groups will typically gather a portfolio of green initiatives (e.g. reforestation), and then put the money they receive into those efforts in an amount proportional to the carbon produced by an organization or event. So, in the example of scholarly societies with annual meetings, we would calculate how many attendees flew to the host city, pay a third-party however much reforestation would offset that amount of carbon emissions, and then cover the cost by increasing registration or member fees for the event in the name of bringing us closer to carbon neutral.
But there is a plethora of unanswered questions regarding these carbon offset programs. First, it’s not always clear the amount of money going directly to the green initiatives themselves. This is made worse by investigations showing that both the third-party carbon offset organizations and the agencies that accredit their work do not always accomplish the carbon offset results that buyers expect. Similarly, the efforts themselves may be flawed. Reforestation efforts are often undercut by local and federal governments in the localities where reforestation happens, and private attempts to reforest can become insufficient to tackle the problem in its entirety.
Fortunately, federation organizations have more options available to them. Like the membership organizations that they serve, federations are at their strongest when they are pooling money from their members to run programing that either benefits their members directly or acts on their behalf. Since these federations often run scholarship, grant, and fellowship programing, one solution to get around the uncertainty of carbon offset providers is for federations to sponsor their own climate research grants. Membership organizations that desire to be pro-climate would pay into a fund administered by their federation, who would then field applications from climate groups and award the money directly to researchers or programs themselves.
This method carries the dual benefit of knowing exactly where its members’ dollars are going as well as forming direct ties with the scientific and public policy community where none existed before. It allows membership organizations to dedicate as much or as little as they want to the effort and gives them flexibility in how the effort fits into their budget instead of passing the cost directly along to their membership through meeting registration fees. This direct interaction and accountability could then be turned into a yearly climate report to build support and interest in the program among members and the membership organizations. It also gives more flexibility to the range of programs that are funded: instead of potentially undermined reforestation programs, the grant could go to direct air carbon capture research like BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage).
Accountability and impact are all critically important in the early stages of turning our membership organizations into climate actors. As researchers ourselves we can appreciate the idea of putting money toward technologies and research that are untested, new, or perhaps go underfunded because there is no apparent, direct, real-world application. We know science needs both immediate and long-term research like these initiatives, and a federation-produced grant program would be a familiar way for us to dip our toes in unfamiliar waters.
The Climate Czar
Familiar to all membership organizations is the budgetary crunch for staff. Nonprofits are famously understaffed, where all employees serve as CEOs (Chief Everything Officers). Like many organizations, we show our priorities in where we dedicate staff: development officers, communications, budget, legal…our About pages are as much a description of who we are as they are a signal for what we care about most.
It would stand, then, that a climate officer in every membership organization would be an even brighter signal to the seriousness and severity of our climate situation. This person could not just advice the organization itself on better practices, but could be lent out to academic departments and administrations for their own efforts; rally membership into collective action; and build bridges between our academic members and other climate actors from a variety of fields.
The feasibility of such a position, however, is minimal to nonexistent. Whether the pandemic brought layoffs or simply a budgetary freeze, pre-pandemic nonprofit budgets that were already not able to take on additional staff are certainly no better prepared now.
It is more feasible that our federation organizations could make this climate position a reality. While our federations’ budgets are no better off during a pandemic than our own, they enjoy a position of collective momentum from their constituents that increases as their commitment to climate action grows. There is little direct climate connection for a membership organization that looks after scholars of the ancient Mediterranean. There is, however, a great number of benefits conferred by an on-call climate advisor from the federation who can:
- Advise on intradepartmental speaking/conference programing to cut down on intercampus travel
- Advocate for the department to higher administration by calculating financial and carbon footprint reduction done for the sake of the university
- Broker connections between local public action organizations to create internships for graduate students looking to take their research skills into the public sphere
To commit one person to such a monumental task is to overwork yet another nonprofit employee. But the impact of a climate czar will not be felt until the efficacy of the position can be fully put to the test, and our federation organizations are best equipped to run such a pilot program and model good leadership and feasibility for the rest of us, while carrying the additional benefit of furthering and strengthening the federation’s position as a stalwart climate actor.
The Video Licenses
This past year has integrated video meeting software into our daily lives at a level rivaled only by email in its ubiquity. With the end – or at least the vaccines – in sight, it remains unclear just how much of our work lives will continue to rely on this essential service. What is clear is that academic exchange will continue to require some level of stable, effective, cheap, and available video communication software. What’s more, I do not think it alarmist to assume that the winding down of this turbulent time will see an increase in exploitative behavior by existing platforms and an explosion of new, costly video meeting software vying for a piece of the post-pandemic pie.
Likewise, inequities already present in the video software gap will only be exacerbated. Many educational institutions are still unable to provide adequate licenses for their entire faculty, staff, and student body, some relying on the unpredictable philanthropy of the wealthy in order to have adequate digital tools. Combined with the 2020 budget cuts for academic travel – budgets that are not known to go up even when times are “normal” – the shrinking availability of these tools will meet with an increased need for their use, and funnel the small number of licenses available to a number that, due to its unavailability, reignites carbon-heavy travel. This squeeze will disproportionally affect smaller institutions and a reduced travel budget would shift the responsibility for travel costs onto staff and faculty themselves, a population that was increasingly underpaid and increasingly insecure in their employment even before the global pandemic began.
To guard against this funneling of availability and to encourage a more carbon-neutral academic exchange in the post-pandemic world our federations should offer a small repository of rentable video conferencing licenses for professionals and academics. Such a treasury would relieve the pressure that will inevitably build up as software licenses become scarcer, and would allow federations the opportunity to produce more robust and climate-centric guidance on when and how video conferencing should take preference.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, we cannot expect the same level of in-person meetings of our memberships that we (perhaps) enjoyed before the pandemic. The benefits of increased accessibility and cost are too difficult to ignore. Members will demand some form of virtual attendance at these meetings, and a strong line of federation guidance for where the line can be drawn would give membership organizations still scrambling to adjust to the new normal something to point to when making their own decisions. What we can expect, however, is that the smaller, interinstitutional exchanges involving guest speakers, one-day conferences, and faculty hiring talks would be better served by having a virtual rather than in-person presence, and institutions will be more open to taking that carbon-reducing step if they know there is a reliable stockpile of software available to them even if their institutions lose their licenses.
This kind of systemic rethinking of how we approach our climate-producing activities is the only way measurable climate action is going to take place at our institutions and organizations over time. It is not enough to turn a formerly in-person annual meeting into a hybrid meeting and call it a climate success. We must not only build in a new way of thinking when it comes to how we plan and organize ourselves, but federations can and must play a critical role in providing the infrastructure we need to do that work with confidence and support.
We Do This Together
Outside forces have pit the scientific policy and academic communities against each other for decades. This has led to an icy silence between the two communities at its best, and an openly contentious brawl over table scrap funding at its worst. Combined with a lack of policy imagination on our part, this position has led to a cul-de-sac of ideas when it comes to how our membership organizations can actively and substantively contribute to the world around us.
This discussion cannot end here. We must innovate even more dramatic ways to combat climate change in our own organizations individually and collectively through our federations. We must also recognize the high potential in engaging with communities of science and public policy. We all know how critical it is to gain allies in the fight for our disciplines; that same urgency exists in these outside spaces as well, and I think our actions and openness to take charge and make change would gain us more allies than we thought possible, and we’d get to save the world at the same time.
