A significant part of the University’s carbon footprint comes from business travel and the Sustainability Team has published a Business Travel Toolkit to help staff choose the most appropriate and low carbon option. That’s why we were thrilled to hear about Alix Dietzel’s recent trip to Bonn Climate Conference, where she opted to travel by rail over flying. We caught up with her to find out how it went, and hopefully inspire more of our research community to do the same!
Can you share your reasons for going to the conference?
“I went to Bonn to observe the climate change negotiations ahead of the next Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Azerbaijan. These ‘intersessional’ negotiations mark the halfway point between COPs and it is a good chance to see what is on the table at the next COP, where we are after COP28 and what the major sticking points are. In addition, this year Dr Alice Venn, Dr Katharina Richter and myself, got the chance to present a ‘side-event’, which was selected from over 400 applications by the UNFCCC. We teamed up with C40 cities, Green Africa Youth Organization and the Youth Climate Change Council Alliance to discuss how to pursue inclusive urban climate policies.”
Why did you decide to travel by rail?
“My main consideration was the emissions. Bonn is 8-10 hours away by train – about the same amount of time it took me to get to Dubai by plane for COP28. I avoid flying when I can, but sometimes it is unavoidable due to practicalities. In this case, I was able to add two travel days to my itinerary by only attending the conference for four days. I don’t like to leave my four-year-old daughter for longer than a week – she needs me. I’m privileged to have her in full-time nursery and am married to a very involved father, which made it possible to leave for this long.”
Alix Dietzel waiting for a train.
Can you tell us about the journey?
“I did a four-leg journey. Bristol to London (1.5 hours), London to Brussels (2 hours), Brussels to Cologne (2 hours) and finally Cologne to Bonn (half an hour).
In terms of comfort, I preferred the train journey to flying! I’m quite tall and train seats are roomier, especially the Eurostar and ICE trains in Germany. There’s also free Wi-Fi, multiple plugs for charging, plenty of room for a laptop, and it’s easier to get up and buy snacks or stretch your legs on the train than on a plane.
The changes between trains were great for getting fresh air and trying foods from different countries. I haven’t been to three countries in one day before, and that is a perk – having lunch in London, a coffee break in Brussels and then dinner in Germany was a culinary treat!
I missed one connection due to a delayed train from London to Brussels, which meant I queued for 20 minutes to get a special ticket from the Eurostar counter. I was only delayed by an hour and it didn’t cost me any more money.”
Alix Dietzel at the Bonn climate change conference
How was your experience at the conference?
“I really enjoyed watching the intersessional negotiations because they felt more relaxed, honest, and open compared to the COPs where there is a lot of pressure to find agreement. It’s also a space where you can approach negotiators more easily, because things are less hectic. For example, I was able to have a chat with a UK negotiator and share a bit about my research with him between negotiations.
It’s much smaller than a COP. COP28 had 100k people present and sprawled over a huge venue that has not only the negotiations, but ‘exhibition spaces’ which have events, meaning at times there are about 400 talks at once you could attend! SB60 had 8,600 people and was contained in a single building. This makes it much easier to navigate and focus on the negotiations, with only 5-10 events overlapping at any one time.”
What would you say to colleagues considering land-based business travel instead of flying?
“Try it! Speak to the University’s business travel booking team at Clarity and consider your options. Even doing half of the journey by rail would have huge emissions savings and enable them to compare. I am mindful of equality and inclusion issues, such as caring responsibilities, and would reassure them that sometimes, you do have to fly, and that this is understandable.”
We estimate that Alix’s journey by rail saved 159kg of CO2 – the equivalent to heating an average home for nearly two months.
If you’d like to explore routes travelling over land rather than flying visit https://routezero.world/.
If you’re a member of staff considering how to take low impact business travel, visit the Business Travel Toolkit or contact the University of Bristol Business Travel Team.
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This blog has been written by Hannah Morgans, Sustainability Communications Project Officer and Dr Alix Dietzel, Senior Lecturer in Climate Justice in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies and Associate Director for Impact and Innovation at the Cabot Institute for the Environment.This blog has been reposted with kind permission from the University of Bristol’s Sustainability Team. View the original blog.
Is hydrogen the lifeblood of a low-carbon future, or an overhyped distraction from real solutions? One thing is certain – the coal, oil and natural gas which currently power much of daily life must be phased out within coming decades. From the cars we drive to the energy that heats our homes, these fossil fuels are deeply embedded in society and the global economy. But is the best solution in all cases to swap them with hydrogen – a fuel which only produces water vapour, and not CO₂, when burned?
Answering that question are six experts in engineering, physics and chemistry.
Road and rail
Hu Li, Associate Professor of Energy Engineering, University of Leeds
Transport became the UK’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in 2016, contributing about 28% of the country’s total.
Replacing the internal combustion engines of passenger cars and light-duty vehicles with batteries could accelerate the process of decarbonising road transport, but electrification isn’t such a good option for heavy-duty vehicles such as lorries and buses. Compared to gasoline and diesel fuels, the energy density (measured in megajoules per kilogram) of a battery is just 1%. For a 40-tonne truck, just over four tonnes of lithium-ion battery cells are needed for a range of 800 kilometres, compared to just 220 kilograms of diesel.
With the UK government set to ban fossil fuel vehicles from 2035, hydrogen fuel cells could do much of the heavy lifting in decarbonising freight and public transport, where 80% of hydrogen demand in transport is likely to come from.
A fuel cell generates electricity through a chemical reaction between the stored hydrogen and oxygen, producing water and hot air as a byproduct. Vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells have a similar driving range and can be refuelled about as quickly as internal combustion engine vehicles, another reason they’re useful for long-haul and heavy-duty transport.
Hydrogen fuel can be transported as liquid or compressed gas by existing natural gas pipelines, which will save millions on infrastructure and speed up its deployment. Even existing internal combustion engines can use hydrogen, but there are problems with fuel injection, reduced power output, onboard storage and emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOₓ), which can react in the lower atmosphere to form ozone – a greenhouse gas. The goal should be to eventually replace internal combustion engines with hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles that are too large for lithium-ion batteries. But in the meantime, blending with other fuels or using a diesel-hydrogen hybrid could help lower emissions.
It’s very important to consider where the hydrogen comes from though. Hydrogen can be produced by splitting water with electricity in a process called electrolysis. If the electricity was generated by renewable sources such as solar and wind, the resulting fuel is called green hydrogen. It can be used in the form of compressed gas or liquid and converted to methane, methanol, ammonia and other synthetic liquid fuels.
But nearly all of the 27 terawatt-hours (TWh) of hydrogen currently used in the UK is produced by reforming fossil fuels, which generates nine tonnes of CO₂ for every tonne of hydrogen. This is currently the cheapest option, though some experts predict that green hydrogen will be cost-competitive by 2030. In the meantime, governments will need to ramp up the production of vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells and storage tanks and build lots of refuelling points.
Hydrogen can play a key role in decarbonising rail travel too, alongside other low-carbon fuels, such as biofuels. In the UK, 6,049 kilometres of mainline routes run on electricity – that’s 38% of the total. Trains powered by hydrogen fuel cells offer a zero-emission alternative to diesel trains.
The Coradia iLint, which entered commercial service in Germany in 2018, is the world’s first hydrogen-powered train. The UK recently launched mainline testing of its own hydrogen-powered train, though the UK trial aims to retrofit existing diesel trains rather than design and build entirely new ones.
Aviation
Valeska Ting, Professor of Smart Nanomaterials, University of Bristol
Of all of the sectors that we need to decarbonise, air travel is perhaps the most challenging. While cars and boats can realistically switch to batteries or hybrid technologies, the sheer weight of even the lightest batteries makes long-haul electric air travel tricky.
Single-seat concept planes such as the Solar Impulse generate their energy from the sun, but they can’t generate enough based on the efficiency of current solar cells alone so must also use batteries. Other alternatives include synthetic fuels or biofuels, but these could just defer or reduce carbon emissions, rather than eliminate them altogether, as a carbon-free fuel like green hydrogen could.
Hydrogen is extremely light and contains three times more energy per kilogram than jet fuel, which is why it’s traditionally used to power rockets. Companies including Airbus are already developing commercial zero-emission aircraft that run on hydrogen. This involves a radical redesign of their fleet to accommodate liquid hydrogen fuel tanks.
An artist’s impression of what hydrogen-powered commercial flight might look like. Airbus
There are some technical challenges though. Hydrogen is a gas at room temperature, so very low temperatures and special equipment are needed to store it as a liquid. That means more weight, and subsequently, more fuel. However, research we’re doing at the Bristol Composites Institute is helping with the design of lightweight aircraft components made out of composite materials. We’re also looking at nanoporous materials that behave like molecular sponges, spontaneously absorbing and storing hydrogen at high densities for onboard hydrogen storage in future aircraft designs.
France and Germany are investing billions in hydrogen-powered passenger aircraft. But while the development of these new aircraft by industry continues apace, international airports will also need to rapidly invest in infrastructure to store and deliver liquid hydrogen to refuel them. There’s a risk that fleets of hydrogen aeroplanes could take off before there’s a sufficient fuel supply chain to sustain them.
Heating
Tom Baxter, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Chemical Engineering, University of Aberdeen & Ernst Worrell, Professor of Energy, Resources and Technological Change, Utrecht University
If the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hydrogen’s recommendations are taken up, the UK government is likely to support hydrogen as a replacement fuel for heating buildings in its next white paper. The other option for decarbonising Britain’s gas heating network is electricity. So which is likely to be a better choice – a hydrogen boiler in every home or an electric heat pump?
First there’s the price of fuel to consider. When hydrogen is generated through electrolysis, between 30-40% of the original electric energy is lost. One kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity in a heat pump may generate 3-5 kWh of heat, while the same kWh of electricity gets you only 0.6-0.7 kWh of heat with a hydrogen-fuelled boiler. This means that generating enough hydrogen fuel to heat a home will require electricity generated from four times as many turbines and solar panels than a heat pump. Because heat pumps need so much less energy overall to supply the same amount of heat, the need for large amounts of stored green energy on standby is much less. Even reducing these losses with more advanced technology, hydrogen will remain relatively expensive, both in terms of energy and money.
So using hydrogen to heat homes isn’t cheap for consumers. Granted, there is a higher upfront cost for installing an electric heat pump. That could be a serious drawback for cash-strapped households, though heat pumps heat a property using around a quarter of the energy of hydrogen. In time, lower fuel bills would more than cover the installation cost.
Replacing natural gas with hydrogen in the UK’s heating network isn’t likely to be simple either. Per volume, the energy density of hydrogen gas is about one-third that of natural gas, so converting to hydrogen will not only require new boilers, but also investment in grids to increase how much fuel they can deliver. The very small size of hydrogen molecules mean they’re much more prone to leaking than natural gas molecules. Ensuring that the existing gas distribution system is fit for hydrogen could prove quite costly.
In high-density housing in inner cities, district heating systems – which distribute waste heat from power plants and factories into homes – could be a better bet in a warming climate, as, like heat pumps, they can cool homes as well as heat them.
Above all, this stresses the importance of energy efficiency, what the International Energy Agency calls the first fuel in buildings. Retrofitting buildings with insulation to make them energy efficient and switching boilers for heat pumps is the most promising route for the vast majority of buildings. Hydrogen should be reserved for applications where there are few or no alternatives. Space heating of homes and buildings, except for limited applications like in particularly old homes, is not one of them.
Electricity and energy storage
Petra de Jongh, Professor of Catalysts and Energy Storage Materials, Utrecht University
Fossil fuels have some features that seem impossible to beat. They’re packed full of energy, they’re easy to burn and they’re compatible with most engines and generators. Producing electricity using gas, oil, or coal is cheap, and offers complete certainty about, and control over, the amount of electricity you get at any point in time.
Meanwhile, how much wind or solar electricity we can generate isn’t something that we enjoy a lot of control over. It’s difficult to even adequately predict when the sun will shine or the wind will blow, so renewable power output fluctuates. Electricity grids can only tolerate a limited amount of fluctuation, so being able to store excess electricity for later is key to switching from fossil fuels.
Hydrogen seems ideally suited to meet this challenge. Compared to batteries, the storage capacity of hydrogen is unlimited – the electrolyser which produces it from water never fills up. Hydrogen can be converted back into electricity using a fuel cell too, though quite a bit of energy is lost in the process.
Unfortunately, hydrogen is the lightest gas and so it’s difficult to store and transport it. It can be liquefied or stored at very high pressures. But then there’s the cost – green hydrogen is still two to three times more expensive than that produced from natural gas, and the costs are even higher if an electrolyser is only used intermittently. Ideally, we could let hydrogen react with CO₂, either captured from the air or taken from flue gases, to produce renewable liquid fuels that are carbon-neutral, an option that we’re investigating at the Debye Institute at Utrecht University.
Heavy industry
Stephen Carr, Lecturer in Energy Physics, University of South Wales
Industry is the second most polluting sector in the UK after transport, accounting for 21% of the UK’s total carbon emissions. A large proportion of these emissions come from processes involving heat, whether it’s firing a kiln to very high temperatures to produce cement or generating steam to use in an oven making food. Most of this heat is currently generated using natural gas, which will need to be swapped out with a zero-carbon fuel, or electricity.
Let’s look in depth at one industry: ceramics manufacturing. Here, high-temperature direct heating is required, where the flame or hot gases touch the material being heated. Natural gas-fired burners are currently used for this. Biomass can generate zero-carbon heat, but biomass supplies are limited and aren’t best suited to use in direct heating. Using an electric kiln would be efficient, but it would entail an overhaul of existing equipment. Generating electricity has a comparably high cost too.
Swapping natural gas with hydrogen in burners could be cheaper overall, and would require only slight changes to equipment. The Committee on Climate Change, which advises the UK government, reports that 90 TWh of industrial fossil fuel energy per year (equivalent to the total annual consumption of Wales) could be replaced with hydrogen by 2040. Hydrogen will be the cheapest option in most cases, while for 15 TWh of industrial fossil fuel energy, hydrogen is the only suitable alternative.
Hydrogen is already used in industrial processes such as oil refining, where it’s used to react with and remove unwanted sulphur compounds. Since most hydrogen currently used in the UK is derived from fossil fuels, it will be necessary to ramp up renewable energy capacity to deliver truly green hydrogen before it can replace the high-carbon fuels powering industrial processes.
The same rule applies to each of these sectors – hydrogen is only as green as the process that produced it. Green hydrogen will be part of the solution in combination with other technologies and measures, including lithium-ion batteries, and energy efficiency. But the low-carbon fuel will be most useful in decarbonising the niches that are currently difficult for electrification to reach, such as heavy-duty vehicles and industrial furnaces.
I was really proud to see that the University of Bristol declared a climate emergency. It was one of those moments that makes you feel part of a worthwhile institution (despite its many other flaws, like all institutions). Inspired by the exploding #Fridaysforclimate movement and the speeches of brave activist @GretaThunberg, I had been thinking about what I could personally do to contribute to the needed paradigm change. It did not take much reflection to realise that the most effective change in my professional life would clearly be to cut down travel, specially by air. And so, the University’s announcement prompted me to ‘go public’ with it.
This is great news. I take this opportunity to personally pledge to minimise conference travel, especially by air. It is tricky, but we academics need to rethink the way we organise conferences and other events #smallerco2footprintforknowledgexchangehttps://t.co/6YkJWQ9XCX
— Dr Albert Sánchez-Graells (@asanchezgraells) April 17, 2019
This tweet prompted a series of exchanges with colleagues from Bristol and elsewhere. The reaction was mainly in three directions. First, that such a personal ‘no travel policy’ may be impossible to adopt in the context of (UK) academia, where public and conference speaking is used as both a measure of ‘academic productivity’ and as a proxy for esteem/standing in the field for the purposes of eg promotion—so, either you travel, or you may be seen as not doing your job or/and not worthy of (further) promotion. Second, that this would reduce the likely impact of my research and cut me off from potentially relevant audiences. Third, that this would exclude some of the very enjoyable moments that come with academic conferences, where you end up socialising with likely-minded colleagues and developing networks of collaborators and, if lucky, friends.
All of these are important points, so I have given this a little bit more thought.
First, I have to concede that not traveling to conferences will be an issue in terms of justifying my engagement with the academic (and policy-making) communities unless I manage to find a way to still participate in conferences. But this should not be too difficult. Today, there is large number of options to organise webinars and to allow for remote participation in meetings, so there is really no excuse not to take advantage of them. The technology is there and most institutions offer the required equipment and software, so it is high time that academics (and policy-makers) start using it as the default way of organising our interactions. This can even have secondary positive effects, such as the possibility of recording and publishing all or part of the conferences/meetings, so that different people can engage with the discussion at different times.
I also concede that not traveling to conferences and workshops can have a negative impact on ‘CV-building’ and that this will reduce any academic’s prospect of promotion. But I can only say that, to my shame and regret, I have been burning too much CO2 to get to my current academic position. In current lingo, I have exhausted (or, more likely, exceeded) my CO2 budget for conferences, so I can no longer afford to do it. If this means that my employer may not consider me deserving of a higher academic position as they may otherwise have, then I will have to accept any delays that come from implementing a no travel policy. In the grand scheme of things, this is a tiny sacrifice.
I acknowledge that this is something I can do from the very privileged academic position I am lucky to have, so I have no intention of proselytising. However, I do plan to try to change the system. I will work with my local trade union branch to see if we can make specific proposals to reduce the CO2 footprint of the promotions procedure. I will also organise webinars and non-presential conferences and offer every opportunity I can, in particular to early career researchers, so that academics can carry on with ‘CV-building’ (and, more importantly, knowledge-exchange) despite not traveling. These are the remedial actions I can and will implement. If you can think of others, please let me know. I would be more than happy to chip in.
Second, I must say that I have generally reached the audience for my academic work online. Only very rarely have I spoken at a conference or workshop where participants did not know my work from my SSRN page and this blog. With the partial exception of Brussels-based policy-makers (when I have been member of expert groups), every other policy-making body and NGO that has engaged with my work has done so remotely and, oftentimes, without any sort of direct conversation or exchange. There are plenty opportunities for academics to share their work online on open access and this has made the need for last-century-type conferences and workshops largely redundant for the purposes of knowledge and research dissemination. We need to realise this and use it to the advantage of a lower CO2 footprint for knowledge exchange.
Third, the social component is more difficult to address. There is no question that socialising at conferences and workshops has value in and of itself. It is also clear that, once you establish a network, you do not need to meet regularly with your collaborators and friends (however nice it is) to keep it going. So this may be the only aspect of conference travel that could justify going to a very specific event eg to establish new connections or to rekindle/deepen existing ones. But maybe this can be done without flying—eg in the case of UK-based academics like me, to prioritise conferences in Europe and convincing our employers and ourselves to take the extra time to travel by train or bus (anecdotally, most academics I know love train trips).
So, all in all, I have reaffirmed myself in the commitment to minimise my conference travel and, from today, I plan to not accept invitations to speak at or attend any conferences that require me to fly (although I will still fulfill the few prior commitments that I have). I will always ask for a ‘virtual alternative’, though, and I am really hoping that this will be acceptable (or even welcome).
Thus, in case you organise a conference on a topic within my expertise, here is my message: I will not fly to your conference, but I hope you will still invite me to participate. I hope you will because we have the technology to do this and because I value of our exchanges.
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This blog is written by Dr Albert Sanchez Graells, Reader in Economic Law at the University of Bristol. This blog was reposted with kind permission from Albert. You can view his original blog post here.
As part of Green Great Britain Week, supported by BEIS, we are posting a series of blogs throughout the week highlighting what work is going on at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment to help provide up to date climate science, technology and solutions for government and industry. We will also be highlighting some of the big sustainability actions happening across the University and local community in order to do our part to mitigate the negative effects of global warming. Today our blog will look at ‘Considering the actions businesses can take on climate change’.
Our University is justly famous for the breadth and depth of its work on Sustainability. This ranges from research on the effect of micro plastics on the oceans, through food and farming, to the effect of resource-driven migration. We are also tackling arguably the biggest problem of all: developing the tools and techniques that will help us to fight climate change.
Our Sustainability Policy is clear that we need to walk the talk and demonstrate that we are supporting a sustainable world in our operations and strategies.
The University of Bristol’s Sustainability team co-ordinates sustainability activity across the organisation, continually innovating to find ways of reducing our environmental impact against a backdrop of growing staff and student numbers, increasingly bespoke teaching and ever more complex research requirements. The team has particular responsibility for waste resource management, energy, water and transport, and engages with staff and students in many different ways through community engagement, biodiversity activities, sustainable food and sustainable procurement.
1. A changing landscape
The team is led by Martin Wiles, who has been with the University since 2001. “Innovation is at the heart of what we do,” says Martin. “Everyone in the sector knows that the fundamentals are changing, and that change is accelerating. It’s difficult to see what the pedagogical, economic or political landscape is going to be even a year ahead. So, we see our activities as being guided by three principles: how do we support excellence in teaching, research and the staff and student experience? How do we reduce resource use whilst saving money? How do we ensure that we are compliant with increasingly complex environmental legislation? We also feel that we have a role in distilling our findings and disseminating good practice to the wider sector.”
2. Sustainable Laboratories
A good example of how this thinking is applied in practice is the Sustainable Labs Initiative, which focuses on improving the safety, sustainability and success of our laboratories. Energy manager Chris Jones says, “We had known for a long time that our highly-serviced labs represent only 5% of our floor area but use 40% of our energy. In recent years, controls for air handling have improved immensely and we have started to roll out best practice, starting with our Synthetic Chemistry building. We have been able to reduce electricity consumption by 30% there whilst still delivering the same level of service.” The project has been implemented by Chris, working with Anna Lewis, the Team’s Sustainable Labs officer. A former Research Technician herself, Anna works closely with academic and research staff to minimise resource use by better management. “Staff understand the issues,” says Anna, “and they are very happy to help. We can usually achieve better environmental performance and better safety through relatively small changes to our way of working.”
3. Closing the loop on waste
This sentiment is echoed by Rose Rooney, the Environmental Management System (EMS) and Circular Economy Manager. “If we treat everything in isolation, the task of compliance becomes unnecessarily expensive and intrusive in people’s work. Adhering to the EMS processes saves time and aids compliance. A good example is waste. If we are informed early and fully that a consignment of waste needs to be removed, we can deal with it cheaply and easily, often finding a route for it to be reused or recycled. We are moving away from the idea of waste to becoming a circular economy, where the output from one process becomes the input for another.” She cites the University’s popular and successful Re-store programme, which allows furniture and equipment from one group to be used by another, and The Bristol Big Give, where students’ unwanted items that would normally go to waste at the end of term are collected and sent to be sold for charities. Many tonnes of items are now being reused that might otherwise have gone to landfill.
4. Be The Change
Bristol Big Give is just one example of a number of behaviour change initiatives delivered by the team to encourage the sustainable behaviours as part of work, study and home life. Maev Moran, Communications and Campaigns Assistant, oversees the delivery of these initiatives: “We have found that audiences respond more positively and proactively to messages of empowerment than to negative messages. Be The Change, a scheme we launched in June, has quickly become the most popular ongoing initiative among University staff. It covers all areas of sustainability while making rewarding everyday actions, creating a step-by-step guide towards reducing our environmental impact both at home and in the workplace. The breadth of the scheme also means we can factor wellbeing in to our ability to have a positive impact, particularly as part of a wider community.”
5. Travel and transport
Amy Heritage is responsible for Transport at the University, including managing the University’s travel plan, facilities for people who walk or cycle to work or study, the University’s bus services (Bristol Unibus), including the new U2 bus service to Langford and initiatives/incentives to encourage behaviour change on all other modes of travel. “Our Staff and students are great at making sustainable travel choices. Our job is to make this as easy as possible.” She says that our travel plan is a key part in ensuring we are acknowledged as a good corporate citizen, and her team is looking at ways of improving the management of University vehicles and making it more attractive to replace meetings that would otherwise have required flights with video conferences.
Future plans
The team are starting the new academic year with plans for plans for efficiency savings on heating, laboratory ventilation and lighting, making sure we are compliant with new legislation, and collaborative work with Computer Science staff on how the operation of building services translates to staff and student wellbeing. There are plans for more renewable energy generation, smart controls for buildings, and adding to our electric vehicle fleet. “Once more, it’s a project about reducing our environmental impact while freeing up resources for excellent teaching and research, and staff and student wellbeing,” says Martin Wiles, “and that’s what we’re here to do.”
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This blog is written by John Brenton, Sustainability Manager in the University of Bristol’s Sustainability Team.
Workshops, conferences, field work – national and international travel is an essential part of many PhD programs. I’ve been lucky enough to see numerous new parts of the globe during my studies, and, less luckily, numerous different airport layovers (I’m currently writing this post from a corridor between terminals at Washington airport…!).
I’m on my way back to Bristol from a workshop in Ecuador on volcanic unrest, which culminated with an eruption simulation exercise. As my PhD is focused on unravelling the science behind volcanic unrest, these trips (this is the second of three with this specific aim) form a main focus for the real-world application of my research.
This workshop was split into 3 different parts. The first was a series of lectures on how volcanologists, social scientists, emergency managers, civil protection officials, and the general public interact during volcanic crises. Each specialist contributed their individual expertise, in my case as a volcanologist interpreting the signals that the volcano gives off, but the main message was that communication at all times between all parties must be especially clear. As with almost all lectures though, this part of the workshop obviously wasn’t the most exciting – especially with the inevitable jet-lagged tiredness kicking in for the first few days.
The second part of the workshop took us out into the field to explore two of Ecuador’s most famous volcanoes: Cotopaxi and Tungurahua. This was my favourite part! These are two quite epic volcanoes with the classical conical shape you imagine when you think of a volcano. By examining them in situ we learnt about the hazards they pose today to many nearby towns and cities. This really helps to put my research into perspective, as I know that by contributing to a better understanding of how volcanoes work I am helping to protect the people whose livelihood’s depend on the benefits the volcano brings them (for example, the more fertile soil).
Cotopaxi volcano, summit 5897 m ASL
The final part of the workshop took us to the Ecuadorian national centre for crisis management in Quito (cue vigilant security checks!). Here we conducted the volcanic unrest and eruption simulation. This is similar in some ways to a fire drill but a whole lot more complicated. Simulated monitoring ‘data’ from the volcano is fed to a team of volcanologists who have to quickly interpret what the data means and feed that information in a clear, coherent and understandable way to emergency managers, politicians and civil authorities. Upon the advice of the volcanologists, the decision makers can then choose how best to respond and mitigate a potential impending crisis. As this was just an exercise, different stages in the unrest crisis were dealt with all in one very busy day, with ‘data’ from the volcano arriving every couple of hours but representing several weeks or months in simulated time.
The final ‘update’ from the volcano: BIG eruption! I think we all could have predicted that – everyone likes a grand finale.
Despite the Hollywood firework finish, these exercises are crucial to prepare those individuals who will actually be in positions of responsibility when a true volcanic crisis develops. By playing out the different stages in as close to real-life as possible, strengths and weaknesses were highlighted that will allow for improvements to be made in the future. Improvements that may just save extra lives or livelihoods, and foster improved relationships between the public and the scientists trying to help them.
As one of those scientists, I was just happy enough to be able to take part.
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Cabot Institute member James Hickey is a final year PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences. His research is focused on unravelling the mechanisms that cause volcanoes to become restless prior to eruptions. Ultimately, the aim is to improve our understanding of precursory signals to enhance forecasting and mitigation efforts.
