Locking-in climate-benefits of COVID-19 from air travel: field evidence from a 4-year program to co-create sustainable air travel policies with Indian IT companies

Extended abstract 6-147-26

The FairTravel program has been working with India’s IT industry since 2021 to reduce flying, due to its exceptional contribution to climate crisis that affects all while serving a small population of corporate elite. By working with 4 large IT organizations as early adopters of change, it has worked to shift the discourse on excess flying y employing social-practice theory: shifting both mindset and practice (behavior) and structural change (policy) as both are contributors to and the result of each other. The paper illuminates programmatic insights and results of the first 4 years of work. It examines the need for engaging directly with EU-based clients to jointly address this Scope 3 emissions issue since one flight reduction helps 2 organizations make progress on Science-based Reduction Targets, the role of employee activism in advocating for radical structural changes that repudiate approaches embedded in organizational orthodoxy and achieve incremental changes at best, the visceral influence of loss of livelihood and displacement caused by aviation related mega- projects on employee perception of flying and its negative externalities greatly outweighing the psychological influence of ‘abstract’ harm to the climate. The paper also interrogates the role of valorizing personal climate-sensitive actions by internal and external discourse-shaping actors (influencers) such as company CEOs, cultural/sports icons as well as the negative consequences of strategies that over-emphasize cost-reduction benefits of reduced flying which is conflated with inequitable burden-sharing i.e. low-cost economy class flying is constrained while senior management flies unabated in business class. The potential benefits of complicating the oversimplified narrative of sustainable aviation fuels as being a ‘savior’ that will usher in guilt-free flying in the future, and problematizing techno-fantasies of hydrogen aircraft, electric aircraft etc. as system-change levers is also examined.

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