Calling all funders!
Six ways you can fight climate change
Funders, you have a superpower for fighting climate change and encouraging greater inclusion in professional settings: You can heavily influence your grantees.
1) Embrace your outsized impact
As a funder, you can slash the carbon emissions of all your funded projects at once, which makes you a person or organization with very unusual leverage to fight the climate crisis.
Choosing not to attend a conference because of one’s carbon footprint is a difficult decision for anyone. Even environmental organizations still hold in-person conferences, and their individual members fly to attend. But as a funder, you can help individuals walk their talk, relying not on their own self-sacrificing, but setting a new norm for responsible, sustainable conference travel. Some funders, like the Wellcome Trust, are already developing and implementing policies.
2) Fund less travel to meetings
Require that when your awardees attend or hold conferences to share their work, at least half of these are virtual. Here’s how:
In project budgets, ask awardees to show the number of onsite and virtual conferences they plan to attend using your funds.
Do you fund awardee conferences, advisor meetings and gatherings of far-flung teams? Here, too, you can encourage your awardees to consider virtual instead of onsite formats, especially after an initial project gathering. And you can suggest that they meet in a centralized location for their in-person events, which can reduce emissions by 6-10%.
Researchers have found that flight quotas (e.g., limiting total flown distance or number of flights per person) achieves organizational reductions of 20-50% in emissions, depending on the severity of the restrictions.
3) Ask for travel justifications
Ask your awardees to explain the need for any proposed in-person attendance at a conference, and push back if you can.
Sometimes, onsite attendance is necessary, either because a critical meeting is held only onsite or because the nature of the interactions demand in-person presence. But asking for justifications helps awardees think about their travel priorities when choosing their conferences.
You can ask grant applicants to create a sustainable travel policy and post it in a prominent place on their website.
4) Require low-carbon travel
Ask for documentation that awardees’ transportation emits the least carbon possible.
When traveling to a conference, awardees can make decisions that reduce their carbon emissions, such as selecting (potentially more expensive) non-stop flights or flights with lower emissions, traveling by train, carpooling, and even purchasing carbon offsets. Asking for documentation, or even simply asking for consideration, encourages awardees to make lower-emission travel plans.
Allow award funds to be used to cover approved carbon offsets (if you support this approach).
Keep up on the latest research to maximize your leverage in productive directions as sustainability technology continues to change.
5) Hold virtual meetings yourself
Convert at least half of your own gatherings to virtual formats so as to reduce carbon emissions.
When you meet with your awardees or with other funders, consider holding at least half of those meetings virtually. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for millions (billions?) of people around the world to experience virtual conferences. Unfortunately, those conference were mostly dissatisfying, perhaps because they were put together quickly with substandard virtual tools. Today, the platforms are much stronger, and we’re working with providers to add even more features to support networking and human-human interaction. The mission of the Clean Conferencing Institute is to improve the virtual meeting experience. Let us help.
6) Assess carbon emissions
Normalize the practice of comparing carbon emissions for different potential meeting locations.
Whether funding a grantee’s conference or holding your own, use calculators like this Google Sheet we developed to determine the amount of carbon emitted by attendees to any U.S. location. (Note: The calculator works only for attendees with U.S. Zip Codes.) A good rule of thumb: For a national conference in the United States, locations in the middle of the country with hub airports are best, and there are several to choose from, including Chicago, St. Louis, and Dallas.
Josh Gutwill and Sue Allen are Co-Directors of the Clean Conferencing Institute. At the Institute, we’re working to radically improve virtual conferencing. If you’d like to support us, please consider clicking on the Donate button at the top of the page.