How to radically reduce air travel emissions for student mobilities? UCLouvain case study

Details

Supervisors

Gosseries, Axel

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

While scientists have been warning us about climate change for over 30 years, GHG emissions have yet to start decreasing. While so far, most governments have focused their efforts on renewable energies and energy-sufficiency technologies, it appears that energy-sufficiency measures, meaning restricting energy consumption will be inevitable to limit global warming under 2°C. In the aviation sector, energy sufficiency consists in reducing the number of passengers. This master thesis looks at ways to reconcile climate objectives with air travel-intensive student mobilities by looking at the case of UCLouvain. First, this master thesis evaluates the environmental impact of student mobility. Through a quantitative survey, we found that the impact of a mobility is equivalent to 4 round-trip flights to the destination. While currently implemented measures mainly focus on incentivizing students going on European mobility to take alternative modes of transportation, these measures miss the elephant in the room: transcontinental mobilities are responsible for 75% of UCLouvain student mobility emissions while only accounting for 32% of the total number of mobilities. We found that in order to reach its 48% GHG emissions reduction objectives, UCLouvain should relocate to Europe at least 2/3 of transcontinental mobilities. For decarbonizing European mobilities, this master thesis developed the promising idea of the “Erasmus bus”. Routes would connect university campuses and directly bring students to their mobility destination. These buses would be operated exclusively for students and at low price, which makes it interesting for universities with limited budget.

HERA Award Sustainable Design (Nominée 2024)