celebrity writers

The Dilemma of Holiday Air Travel

Greener Approaches to Consider When Taking Your Vacation Time

Jun 13, 2008

With cheap flights available, many people fly abroad for their holidays, but flying has a high environmental impact. Find out the damage and how you can prevent it below.

The Environmental Impact of Air Travel

The impact of air travel has been found to be significant to the environment as the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change states an average aircraft's emissions has a warming rate of 1.9 times greater than that of carbon dioxide alone largely due to the amount of other gasses that planes produce. This is why air travel is one of the key issues when global warming and climate change are mentioned.

For those concerned with these issues, there are some points to consider.

Local Holidays as a Green Alternative

Instead of going abroad consider looking for local destinations in which to vacation. For example, for Britons there are plenty of remote locations in Scotland, Wales and Ireland for people to enjoy, or, for those seeking sunny weather and water-sports, consider Cornwall as an alternative to Spain and the Mediterranean. Not only can this help to tackle the issue of air travel and its impact on climate change, it might also provide a cheaper alternative to going abroad.

Contentious Carbon-Offsetting Solutions

If flying is a necessity, consider allotting part of the holiday budget to purchasing a form of carbon off-set credit. Carbon off-set is a way of using such schemes as tree planting in order to account for the amount of carbon dioxide a person will use throughout their lifetime and allows the purchaser to receive credit in advance for their efforts.

There are many schemes and many ways in which to do this. However, they are a contentious issue. Some question the effectiveness of the scheme, citing that, just to offset the carbon emissions of every registered driver in the United Kingdom it would take three-quarters of the country being converted into forest land (Great British Forestry Commission, Carbon Sequestration). Accounting for air travel would take a great deal more.

The effectiveness of such schemes, therefore, has been rated under the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon targets system and includes such measures as being able to prove that the initiative has established and met baselines from which its carbon storage can be measured, and that the scheme has done its best to ensure there is no indirect carbon emissions from its practices, amongst other criteria.

Therefore, when considering such schemes, use these three primary questions as a base for deciding a scheme's worth and whether to invest in it or not:

Make sure the area of land and indeed the very trees being purchased are locatable. Any reputable scheme should be able to tell the purchaser precisely where the trees offsetting the purchaser's carbon are through their records.
Ask who owns the trees? Ascertain whether it is the tree or the carbon within the tree that is being offered in the scheme. If only purchasing the carbon there needs to be written agreement that the trees will be maintained for the next ten, twenty or one hundred years to ensure the investment will still be vialbe.
Make sure to invest in new trees. Financing already existing trees will do nothing to offset future carbon emissions.

The copyright of the article The Dilemma of Holiday Air Travel in Green/Simple Living is owned by Steve Williams. Permission to republish The Dilemma of Holiday Air Travel in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.