Transitions to low carbon social futures: Achieving net zero aviation in UK Higher Education:

As part of broader societal shifts to net-zero, this study aims to determine the effectiveness, limitations and impacts, of voluntary individual action in the transition to net zero aviation in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector. This paper studies a ‘fly less’ cohort, overlooked by academic studies to date, offering a real-world case study for conceptualising net zero academic practices. A survey with open and closed questions was designed to analyse the experiences of ‘fly less’ HE staff and post-graduate research students at the University of Leeds (n=86), i.e. self-declared as purposefully reducing their flying for their employment or studies. This study reveals that, first, responsibility for flying less policies need to exist at different scales, weighted more firmly to higher institutional scales; second, flying related to academic fieldtrips and ‘internationalisation’ present major obstacles to fully decarbonizing HEIs; and third, in terms of personal and professional impact on staff and students, the benefits of flying less academic practices are likely to outweigh the harms. In the short-term, HE leadership must engage with whole-institution accountability and ‘hard’ policy interventions, such as carbon budgets. In the longer term, academics and HE leaders must innovate and creatively transition towards net zero academic practices in all areas, as part of degrowth transition that is ethical, participatory, planned and collective.