By Ashley V.
In our last two posts, we learned about the good and bad news of travel. You have carefully weighed the pros and cons and have decided that you will take a vacation. Will you use a remote destination or a cruise? Will you stay at an Airbnb or a hotel? Every choice you make on your trip has an impact on this planet. Our job as citizens of the Earth is to be aware of the effects of our choices and weigh the pros and cons carefully. So in this blog, we will break down the impacts of travel, piece by piece, so you can make informed decisions when you feel traveling is necessary.
Transportation
We can’t take a trip without first choosing the mode of transportation, and what we choose could significantly impact our carbon footprint. For example, the exhaust from aircraft engines is made up of primarily CO2 and water vapor.1 These are two potent greenhouse gases, and we are injecting them right into our atmosphere with every flight we take. When comparing air travel to cruise ships, the average cruise ship passenger emits 0.82 tonnes of carbon dioxide.2 This is roughly equal to a return air trip from London to Tokyo in economy class. Meanwhile, globally ¾ of all rail transport and half of rail freight relies on electricity, meaning it is ripe to take advantage of renewable energy and cut emissions drastically.3 It has been found that taking a train versus a plane for the same distance will cut your carbon emissions by 84%.1 The Sustainable Travel International Organization does a great job of breaking things down for us to see the most carbon-intensive forms of travel.
It would take an acre of forest a year to absorb the same amount of CO2 emissions of a one-way flight from London to New York. That is about the same amount of emissions that the average person in Zimbabwe generates over an ENTIRE year.
Sustainable Travel International
LODGING
Once you find out how you are getting to your destination, it’s time to decide where you will stay. Will it be a fancy resort? An Airbnb? A regular hotel? Will you be camping? The lodging that you choose will have a big impact on your carbon footprint. In the same way that your house generates emissions from energy use, so does your vacation lodging. However, you are probably more conscious and more frugal with your cooling and heating when it comes to your own house than with a hotel room. Just because you don’t have to pay your room’s electricity bill does not mean you should keep the room at an extreme temperature. A lot of energy goes into heating and cooling hotels, resorts, and homestays, not to mention all the energy to maintain their pools, hot water, laundry, etc.
Curious to know the carbon footprint of the hotel you are going to stay at? Check out HotelFootprint.Org. Let’s make better choices like choosing hotels committed to green practices and paying attention to our energy consumption during our stays.
Note: Eco Resorts and camping are great ways to drastically cut your carbon emissions as they are generally less energy-intensive.
FOOD
You have booked the trip, you have just arrived, and you are ready to start enjoying your vacation. What’s first? Getting something to eat. While on vacation, we tend to overindulge ourselves on food and drink. However, food waste is responsible for massive carbon emissions. At home, it is easy to take home leftovers and put them in the fridge for later. On vacation, not so much. If you are lucky enough to have a fridge in the room, it is difficult to locate silverware and reheat leftovers, meaning the food often goes to waste. Not to mention, for remote destinations, it isn’t easy to get food to these locations. Roughly 80% of the food consumed in the tourism industry in the Pacific Islands needs to be brought in from overseas.4 The farther food has to travel, the higher the carbon footprint. What about all-you-can-eat buffets and free breakfasts that have to throw away the leftovers each day? Around the world, less than half of the hotels compost their food, creating massive amounts of food waste that winds up in landfills, generating more greenhouse gas emissions.4
Bottom line, you get to choose every aspect of your trip, from how you get there to what you eat. You can make serious reductions in your carbon emissions with each trip that you take. We are not asking you to stop traveling altogether; we simply ask you to make informed decisions that are best for you and the planet. Stay tuned for the last installment of our Thoughtful Tourism series, where we will lay out all the steps you can take to be a more mindful traveler.
Sources:
2 – Tourism Dashboard: Cruise Ships
3 – Carbon Brief
Sustainable Saplings 
Thank you for the good post of travel choices 😊
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