Do Good and Talk About It: GEM-DIAMOND's Green Plan

by Katharina Weber and Larissa Böckmann

The GEM-DIAMOND doctoral program is committed to sustainability and ethical responsibility. However, in our daily activities, we often experience tensions between these commitments and the expectations placed upon us by the program and the broader academic environment. This post outlines the program's sustainability commitments while highlighting some of the tensions and struggles encountered in striving towards these goals.

Intentional Giving

Recognizing the environmental impact of traveling for conferences and fieldwork, GEM-DIAMOND sets aside a portion of its budget specifically to compensate for these emissions. However, instead of opting for traditional carbon offset projects, the program chooses to donate these funds to NGOs like Client Earth, which work on the systemic level to address climate change. This decision reflects a conscious effort to ensure that every action taken has a meaningful and lasting impact.

Why We Don't Just Offset Carbon

The traditional approach to carbon offsetting often involves investing in projects like reforestation or carbon capture technology. However, GEM-DIAMOND has chosen a different path. Studies have shown that many forest-based and technology-based offsets have overstated their climate benefits, failing to deliver the promised tonne-for-tonne emissions compensation.

Regular scandals bring the insufficiencies of offsetting to light. For example, in 2023, Verra, the world’s leading certifier made headlines, as it was revealed that more than 90% of their rainforest carbon offsets do not represent real emission reductions. Their projects frequently overstate their effectiveness in preventing deforestation and reducing emissions, resulting in "phantom credits" that offer no genuine climate benefit. Unfortunately, these scandals are not the exception but the norm. Finding a credible and effective offsetting project is a search for the needle in the haystack.

By diverting funds to organisations like Client Earth, which focus on advocacy and legal action, GEM-DIAMOND aims to support systemic changes that address the root causes of climate change.

A Participatory Process

The selection process for the annual donation is participatory, empowering the fellows to play an active role. The GEM-DIAMOND fellows propose organisations, covering both systemic advocacy and direct environmental action, that align with the following criteria:

• Impact: The chosen initiative must make a significant difference, whether through advocacy and policy change or direct on-the-ground action like preventing deforestation.
• Transparency: The use of funds must be clear and trackable. For traditional offset projects, the methodology must be approved, while other initiatives must provide transparent usage of the donated funds.
• Climate Change Focus: The project must directly relate to combating climate change.

Fellows then vote on which project to support, ensuring that the decision reflects the values and priorities of the entire GEM-DIAMOND community.

Beyond Carbon Offsetting: A Green Plan for Academia

In the world of academia sustainability is still a side show. International doctoral programs, like GEM-DIAMOND, do not take sustainability concerns into account, when they are being designed. As they try to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange across Europe and beyond, they mandate extensive (if not excessive) inter-European and inter-continental travel. There is no consideration over the sensibility of flying across half the globe for a 2-day conference. In contrast, such behaviour is expected. To be quite transparent, we have also witnessed that for GEM DIAMOND - the commitment to its environmental impact comes second.

There are small starting points for action beyond the financial commitment. The program's Green Plan includes several practical measures to minimise its environmental footprint. For instance, GEM-DIAMOND mandates train travel for journeys under five hours and preferences catering for events that is local, organic, and vegetarian. While the implementation of these ideals still leaves room for improvement, they are easy measures that could be adopted by a much wider audience within academia. If there is one thing that academics have, it is the possibility of working remotely - for example in a train.

For the future sustainability considerations should already be at the forefront when designing doctoral programs. They should not be an afterthought or leave it to money to pay-off environmental burdens. Dedicating a part of the budget for compensation is a good idea. But it can only be one part of the puzzle. As for the rest, maybe it is sufficient to only travel to conferences within reach by train. Maybe individuals may attend a meeting virtually. In some cases, already a sensible temporal or geographical scheduling of activities can make a difference and reduce individual travel. When structurally employed, these are expected to add up to a substantive impact. Maybe data and emails could be stored on sustainably run servers. Maybe sustainability could become a decision-making criterion just as important as cost-efficiency or academic reputation.

And so as we fight our own small battles for more sustainability in academia, we trust Client Earth with the rest.