Responsible travel and air travel
Question: Surely it doesn't matter how green your ecolodge is, if you are flying them out there? Are you not doing something even worse than most tour operators do: persuading people that long-distance travel is not just harmless but actually beneficial?
Our reply: As you know air travel is the fastest growing cause of global warming, soon to be the biggest cause of global warming. The airline industry can create more fuel efficient planes. The Sustainable Aviation Group (including BA & Virgin) aims to introduce new aircraft producing 50% less CO2 than 2000 models. However, these efficiency improvements will not keep pace with the growing demand for flights in terms of reducing emissions.
My view is that the public must pay the real cost of a flight (polluter pays) – and this includes the cost of the environmental impacts as well as the airlines costs. This will effectively happen when the EU require net polluters such as airlines to buy permits to cover their carbon emissions (The European Emissions Trading Scheme) in 2008. The cost of flights will have to go up quite significantly, and this will put a brake on air travel. It may be that the rising price of oil (kerosene), or a tax on kerosene via the air passenger duty, could have a greater or faster impact.
So let’s examine the idea that the entire tourism industry stops selling long haul holidays on the grounds of carbon emissions (of course as tourism is not regulated in the UK or globally then there is no mechanic at all to even begin to think about how this might be possible). Firstly, developing countries would lose the £2bn a year that UK tourists spend on holidays to developing countries. While not all of this money trickles down into local hands, tourism is a significant and growing industry and a mayor employer in many of the world poorest countries. In fact the £2bn spent by UK tourists in developing countries compares favourably with the UK’s entire aid/development budget.
This would mean that local economic development would be restricted in tourist areas, and the effect of that would be that local people would be less likely to be able to use their environmental resources in a sustainable way. In the countries that you mention deforestation for firewood and charcoal burning is major issue – both of which contribute to global warming. Furthermore, in developing countries conservation of National Parks (in many countries 7% of surface area) is in a large part funded by overseas tourist revenues. If tourists were to stop travelling then we’d see further serious deforestation in these Parks and subsequent increases in climate change.
So in summary I think we need to look at the positive and negative impacts of the flight and the holiday in the destination as an entity, rather than saying flights are bad so ignore what follows. If we believe that there is a mechanic (The Emissions Trading Scheme) which can be used to heavily penalise airline polluters; incentivise them to reduce their emissions; and reduce air travel through tourists paying the real costs of travel then the challenge for people like me is to work to improve the benefits of tourism for local people in destinations, and to reduce local environmental impacts. While we wait for the EU to get its act together on carbon trading we offer clients the ability to offset their emissions here http://www.climatecare.org/responsibletravel/ - there is a link from every holiday page on responsiblettravel.com to this.
Finally, on a pragmatic level people want to travel long haul for holidays, and even if we wanted to stop them from doing so there is no way for this to happen (and wouldn’t stopping people from travelling be an infringement of their human rights anyway?). Therefore the challenge as I see it is to make sure that people take their long haul holidays in a more, rather than less responsible way. We need to keep lobbying governments to put in legislation that will force airlines to deal with emissions, and in the meantime to work with the tourism industry to improve tourism in destinations. I think that giving up on encouraging more sustainable tourism in destinations because the EU is sitting on its thumbs regarding carbon trading would be a mistake…
Our reply: As you know air travel is the fastest growing cause of global warming, soon to be the biggest cause of global warming. The airline industry can create more fuel efficient planes. The Sustainable Aviation Group (including BA & Virgin) aims to introduce new aircraft producing 50% less CO2 than 2000 models. However, these efficiency improvements will not keep pace with the growing demand for flights in terms of reducing emissions.
My view is that the public must pay the real cost of a flight (polluter pays) – and this includes the cost of the environmental impacts as well as the airlines costs. This will effectively happen when the EU require net polluters such as airlines to buy permits to cover their carbon emissions (The European Emissions Trading Scheme) in 2008. The cost of flights will have to go up quite significantly, and this will put a brake on air travel. It may be that the rising price of oil (kerosene), or a tax on kerosene via the air passenger duty, could have a greater or faster impact.
So let’s examine the idea that the entire tourism industry stops selling long haul holidays on the grounds of carbon emissions (of course as tourism is not regulated in the UK or globally then there is no mechanic at all to even begin to think about how this might be possible). Firstly, developing countries would lose the £2bn a year that UK tourists spend on holidays to developing countries. While not all of this money trickles down into local hands, tourism is a significant and growing industry and a mayor employer in many of the world poorest countries. In fact the £2bn spent by UK tourists in developing countries compares favourably with the UK’s entire aid/development budget.
This would mean that local economic development would be restricted in tourist areas, and the effect of that would be that local people would be less likely to be able to use their environmental resources in a sustainable way. In the countries that you mention deforestation for firewood and charcoal burning is major issue – both of which contribute to global warming. Furthermore, in developing countries conservation of National Parks (in many countries 7% of surface area) is in a large part funded by overseas tourist revenues. If tourists were to stop travelling then we’d see further serious deforestation in these Parks and subsequent increases in climate change.
So in summary I think we need to look at the positive and negative impacts of the flight and the holiday in the destination as an entity, rather than saying flights are bad so ignore what follows. If we believe that there is a mechanic (The Emissions Trading Scheme) which can be used to heavily penalise airline polluters; incentivise them to reduce their emissions; and reduce air travel through tourists paying the real costs of travel then the challenge for people like me is to work to improve the benefits of tourism for local people in destinations, and to reduce local environmental impacts. While we wait for the EU to get its act together on carbon trading we offer clients the ability to offset their emissions here http://www.climatecare.org/responsibletravel/ - there is a link from every holiday page on responsiblettravel.com to this.
Finally, on a pragmatic level people want to travel long haul for holidays, and even if we wanted to stop them from doing so there is no way for this to happen (and wouldn’t stopping people from travelling be an infringement of their human rights anyway?). Therefore the challenge as I see it is to make sure that people take their long haul holidays in a more, rather than less responsible way. We need to keep lobbying governments to put in legislation that will force airlines to deal with emissions, and in the meantime to work with the tourism industry to improve tourism in destinations. I think that giving up on encouraging more sustainable tourism in destinations because the EU is sitting on its thumbs regarding carbon trading would be a mistake…
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