Climate-Friendly Travel
A travel style that includes planning, reducing, and offsetting traveling carbon emissions.
Why should we care about climate change?
When climate change reaches a 2-degree increase, tourism will be one of the firsts to collapse. Snow would melt, beaches would disappear, forests would burn, and ocean life and wildlife would be gone. The beautiful world that we love to explore will disappear.
What do carbon emissions do?
Carbon emissions trap the heat inside our earth instead of releasing it. The more carbon emissions we generate, the hotter the earth becomes – this leads to climate change. And surprise, tourism contributes to 8% of the global emissions!
How to fix this?
Easy! Too many carbon emissions cause the warming earth. The solution is to reduce our current and future carbon emissions and put the carbon emissions we have in the sky back into the earth!
For travelers, our carbon emissions mostly come from flights and other transport, food, activities, and accommodation! So there is much room for improvement!
How to travel climate-friendly?
PLAN
Plan your Transport!
49% of traveling carbon emissions come from transportation and that is also one of the easiest thing that we can control in planning our trip.
That’s why knowing the carbon emissions generated by different type of vehicles is important.
*1.000 gram/CO2 = 1 Kg/CO2
*Emissions / 100 km per person
Plan your accommodation!
The type of accommodation you choose when traveling also matters and affects your carbon footprint.
Choose an accommodation with a lower climate impact, which usually can be a hostel, climate smart hotel,
simple unheated hotel without air conditioning, and different forms of rental or exchange for apartments.
Average emission: 31kg of carbon/guest/night
Things to consider:
- How many people do you bring?
- How large is the floor area?
- How is their heating system?
- How is the density load of the hotel?
(e.g. it is more crowded during the holidays)
Average emission: 7.8kg of carbon/guest/night
They have on average a 75% lower climate impact per guest compared to the average hotel!
In some cases, can evem emit 0 carbon dioxide!
The resulting carbon emissions are insignificant and negligible compared to conventional accommodations.
For example:
- Accommodation at relatives’ and friends’ homes
- Hiring rooms via Airbnb (as you can filter and choose carbon-neutral accommodations)
- Accommodation in motorhomes, caravans, tents, night trains, or ferry cabins
REDUCE
Food
Eat locally sourced food.
Local food ingredients don’t produce much carbon emissions from being transported!
You can ask a simple question like, ”where did you get the ingredients from?”
Electricity
Save electricity by:
- Unplugging your charger when you are finished
- Turning off the lights, TV and AC when not in use
- Having less hot shower and
- Only changing the towel when needed!
Transport
Whenever you can:
- Walk
- Use public transport
- Electric transportation!
ABSORB
There is no such thing as perfect, and that is totally okay. In the end, tourism and travel will still generate carbon emissions. This is where you can absorb it!
Absorbing is the act of putting back the carbon emissions generated into the earth by supporting any project that captures carbon emissions. And our favorite is mangrove conservation because mangroves can absorb up to 10 times more carbon than terrestrial forests!
See examples on how to absorb carbon below!
