LU Sustainable Travel Stories

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

Local Hub for Canadian Conference

Why I Choose the Train