According to the transportation emissions data, air travel has been the biggest greenhouse source of transportation emissions, and these are hard to decrease.  The campus mission often relies upon in-person visits to other towns, states, and countries. The most time-efficient travel mode is often air travel, and it is difficult to imagine that Illinois faculty, staff, and students could eliminate air travel entirely. International conferences, research, and study abroad have important impacts on the campus missions of scholarship, teaching, and service, including in the area of sustainability. However, there are certainly some situations when a plane trip can be replaced with a train trip or a videoconference, without sacrificing the impact of efforts to support the University’s mission. To encourage staff in these situations to reduce air trips, iSEE created some instructions to help them create teleconference meetings.

Additionally, to encourage a reduction in air travel, the campus could implement a program to provide incentives for departments that reduce their annual air travel emissions. The program would include a method to track annual airline travel emission estimates per department, and an annual report of the per capita airline travel emission estimates and the total estimate for the campus. Additional information regarding the reason for travel and the source of funding could be collected though the Travel and Expense Management (TEM) system. The program would also educate the campus community on the alternatives to air travel, such as trains and videoconferencing. Additionally, campus could improve the infrastructure supporting online conferencing and other virtual meeting technology.

For the remaining GHG emissions associated with air travel, we can encourage units to pay to offset the emissions. The amount of offsets purchased could be increased over time so that air travel emissions would be reduced by 25% from the FY14 value in FY20, 50% in FY25, and 100% in FY30 .