LU Sustainable Travel Stories

Written by: David Alcer, Doctoral student, Department of Physics

To travel is often seen as a core activity of our society. For work or for leisure, travelling for many of us constitutes an important part of our lives. Particularly in academia, which builds on international collaborations, travelling far distances – in many cases by flight – can often seem a necessity. At the same time, we are facing an unprecedented crisis that undermines the very foundations of our societies. It is a complicated situation to live in a society which still normalizes flying and encourages travelling – and try to balance this with an understanding of the consequences of the ongoing climate catastrophe. It can easily leave us in a state of cognitive dissonance in which we try to justify our actions for ourselves although we know that we are bending our conscience and closing our eyes to the consequences. For me, it felt very liberating to decide for permanently staying on the ground. This may initially sound surprising, but having restricted my travelling options to those that leave me with a clean conscience yields a powerful feeling of freedom.

A step towards responsibility

My most recent travel endeavour was for a project meeting in the EU project InsectNeuroNano that I’m currently working for. Meeting all collaborators in Edinburgh was a great experience, both infusing our work with plentiful of new ideas and perspectives, and building social connections. But for me, this journey got even more valuable by all the experiences I made during the travelling itself. Finding a good connection was a little challenging – I can recommend bahn.de as a search engine for European tickets, although I ended up booking some parts of the journey via other train companies as well. The train ride experience was worth this work many times over! Among others, it gave me plenty of time to listen to podcasts (I strongly recommend “Klimatpodden”, it’s in Swedish though) while watching the landscape zoom past. With layovers in London and Amsterdam I had a chance to visit friends I hadn’t seen in a while. In Amsterdam, it was an overnight stay – just enough time to eat home cooked dinner and have a beer together in the evening. At my friends place in London I stayed for an amazing weekend. These meetups, as well as the meeting in Edinburgh, have given me plenty of thoughts to contemplate on while sitting back and enjoying the view on the train ride back home to Lund.

As climate researchers remind us periodically, the choices we make in this decade will determine the fate of humanity. All of us have a moral responsibility. My train travel to Edinburgh left me with the encouraging feeling of having taken a first step towards living up to that responsibility.

7 June 2023

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Written by: David Wahlqvist, Tianyi Hu, Robin Sjökvist and Mikelis Marnauza, Doctoral students, Centre for Analysis and Synthesis, Department of Chemistry

In March 2022 there was a conference taking place at McMaster University in Canada. The topic of the conference was in-situ electron microscopy, which is a narrow topic but also highly relevant for the research groups at Lund University working at the National Center for High Resolution Electron Microscopy (nCHREM). The problem was however that the conference was taking place during only two days, and travelling to Canada to attend a two-day conference is simply too far, even if the topic is highly relevant. Luckily, the conference was adapted to a hybrid format. To attend the conference “from home”, 4 PhD students at nCHREM decided to create a local hub in Lund for the conference.

Due to the time difference between Sweden and Canada, the conference hours were from the late afternoon to the late evening. The local hub event was therefore combined with some nice pizza and beer to kick-start the conference. The first night the local hub gathered in one of the PhD student’s home. This really gave the added benefit not only of making it a social activity, but also of being able to discuss the talks in the group. The arrangement was also very flexible, meaning that everyone could drop in and out according to their schedule.

All-in-all, the PhD students at nCHREM got a very nice conference experience even though they did not travel to the conference location in Canada. The social interaction and discussion elements were clearly there, although the opportunity to network was not. The arrangement was also very flexible, and saved huge amounts of money, CO₂ emissions and travel time. For short but highly relevant conferences, the local hub option is really recommended and probably allows researchers to attend more conferences than what would have been possible if only attending in person.

7 June 2023

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Written by:
Per Becker, Professor, Division of Risk Management and Societal Safety, LTH

Taking the train when my work requires a visit to Stockholm is a matter of course. For this rather common trip, the university’s policy also states that we should take the train and not the plane, which should be completely obvious considering that a flight from Sturup-Bromma-Sturup has hundreds of times the climate impact (depending on the type of aircraft). And that’s not even counting transport to and from the airports, which alone has many times more climate impact than the entire train journey. This is for a time saving of 20-30 minutes door to door for me taking the airport bus. I also prefer four hours of undisturbed working time (or good sleep if I take the night train) than hopping around between airport buses and cramped aircraft seats where at least I, with my 185cm, cannot get a good working position. No, it’s easy to do the right thing sometimes. Something that I think all university employees should try to do if we want the public to have confidence in our scientifically based proposals on how they should contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

I personally prefer to take the train long distance up the country as well. If you combine a night train and an express train, you can cover a very large part of Sweden without a painful backside. For example, I have written large parts of many recent publications on the trains between Lund and Östersund where I spent some time in recent years (a night train + a fast train or a fast train + a night train). Maybe not everyone likes a change of scenery, but for me, who also takes the opportunity to change scenery when I have writing days in Lund, trains, cafés and other temporary places give a creative boost.

If you are like me and have time for research or other tasks that can be carried out anywhere, it also works perfectly well to take the train a bit down in Europe. Even though the long-awaited night train from Malmö to Brussels did not materialise, it is possible to take the train there if you are as focused on protecting our children’s future as I am. However, it is a real full day with three changes (Copenhagen, Hamburg, Cologne I usually take). Last time I was writing an application and modelling social networks on the way down and working on an article on the way home. I got a lot done but I have to admit that I was quite tired after 13 hours regardless of the short stops at restaurants and cafes at the stations along the way. Next time I am thinking of taking the night train Lund-Hamburg to have only two changes and a more normal working day on the way to Brussels.

LU Sustainable Travel Stories

Edinburgh and back

A step towards responsibility

Local Hub for Canadian Conference

Why I Choose the Train