A St Andrews professor urged people to think of the environment before they travel as she spoke at a conference in Australia without setting foot out of Fife.
A professor in sustainable accounting at St Andrews University, Jan Bebbington suggested it was time for academics to start communicating with fellow researchers in a more sustainable fashion.
In what she described as an experiment in low-carbon intellectual renewal, Prof Bebbington filmed her keynote lecture for a major conference in Sydney.
Saving her from flying the 21,000 miles there and back and creating around three tonnes of CO2 emissions, her talk on biodiversity was shown on a large-screen to delegates.
The eco-friendly videocast also meant four of her colleagues from the university could contribute to the conference.
Professor Bebbington, who is vice-chairwoman for Scotland of the Sustainable Development Commission, said, “As a social and environmental accountant, I have become increasingly aware of the threat that climate change poses to the wellbeing of many of our human family who occupy this planet.
“I firmly believe that intellectual communities are part of a broader group of practitioners and thinkers who will be, in part, responsible for helping to shape a future where dangerous climate change is avoided. Gathering together to exchange ideas, to challenge each other and to grow our knowledge base is part and parcel of the response to this issue.
“I thought it would be interesting to think about how we can communicate without necessarily having that carbon footprint attached to it.”
The director of the St Andrews Sustainability Institute suggested that real-time video conferencing should sometimes be used for more sustainable university conferences.
She said, “The message is not a simple one. It is not ‘never travel’, but it is about being reflective about why you travel and when not travelling may offer advantages to being somewhere in person. Think about the opportunities that sometimes present themselves for communicating in a different way.
“Flying around the world to conferences is one aspect of our current lives that may disappear in the future. The need for intellectual renewal, however, will not go away.”
Photo courtesy of Stewart Loyd-Jones.