Whether you’re someone who loves to travel for leisure or frequently need to hop on a plane for work-related travels, you might want to rethink your mode of transport. The aviation industry is responsible for 2.4% of CO2 emissions worldwide, and around 5% of emissions can be attributed to shorter airplane trips, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). You might be thinking, that’s not so bad — the numbers for other modes of transport like cars are way worse, after all.
According to Dan Rutherford, ICCT’s aviation director, that kind of thinking has it a bit backward. A very small portion of the world’s population (around 3%) regularly travels by airplane. In fact, if everyone in the world decided to book only one long-haul flight a year, the CO2 emissions from those flights would be more than the entire United States’s CO2 emissions combined. Flying is, by far, the most damaging to climate change than any other mode of transport if you calculate its emissions on a mile-by-mile basis (via BBC).
So, what can you do? Economics professor at Sweden’s Linnaeus University, Stefan Gössling, told USA Today that people should refrain from taking flights to travel short distances. He suggests taking a train or bus when your journey is shorter than 600 miles. If you don’t have any other choice but to fly, Gössling encourages you to purchase carbon offsets, which will help to reduce greenhouse gasses elsewhere.
