To Fly Or Not To Fly?

The environmental cost of travel

Travelling internationally means long distance journeys, and if we’re honest, journeys by air.

For ease of use and minimum travelling time this form of transport wins hands down. Increasing attention is being given to ‘slow travel’, celebrating the romance and rewards of a low-carbon journey by land or sea, and this option seems to be the obvious choice for cleansing our eco-conscience where time is of low regard, and distances are relatively small. For many of us though who crave the exotic far flung corners of the globe air travel is the reality that we are faced with. How can we balance this international curiosity with our concern for the environment?

Offsetting carbon costs through organisations such as Climate Care that run and develop carbon saving projects to compensate for your extravagance is one option. Although the credibility and consistency of companies offering this service has recently been proved inconsistent. ( read more at Times Online» )

Hopefully by the autumn The Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will have a quality mark established to standardize the calculations used by these initiatives.

Carbon rationing is another suggestion that enables individual carbon allowances to be traded, so that over-producers can distribute their footprints across the ‘carbon accounts’ of those not exhausting their allowance.