The Globe and Mail: Hannah Hoag
Travel guidebooks are asking their readers not to fly, hotels are building compost bins, car-rental companies are adding hybrids to their fleets, ski hills are building wind generators and switching to biodiesel, and airlines are offering customers the chance to buy carbon offsets.
As public concern over global warming grows, travel companies are scrambling to embrace environmentally responsible practices to satisfy the growing number of tourists who are making travel choices weighed on a green scale.
The current green-travel movement evolved out of several trends – ecotourism, sustainable tourism, nature tourism – that emerged well before Kyoto became more than just another travel destination.
Ecotourism and nature tourism are growing at three times the rate of traditional tourism, according to the International Ecotourism Society. The World Travel Organization estimates that ecotourism captures 7 per cent of the international market.
Here are some options to help you stay on the green side of life:
Fly Less
Travel can have an enormous environmental cost. International air travel releases more than 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually – about the same as 158 million cars driving 14,000 kilometres annually. Controversial British writer George Monbiot has said that taking responsibility for climate change means avoiding air travel.
Because takeoff and landing require more fuel than cruising, a series of short-haul flights can cause more damage than a non-stop flight over the same distance. “Basically that means the best option for a shorter-haul flight is an alternate form of transportation,” says Zoë Chafe, a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute and a contributor to WorldChanging, an online publication.
The publishers of Rough Guides and Lonely Planet are asking readers to think twice before they travel. “Fly less, stay longer” has become the Rough Guides mantra. Their guidebooks now offer tips for fighting climate change, such as reducing air travel and opting for night flights.
“We travel by land when our schedule allows it,” Richard Gregory says in an e-mail from Don Khong, an island in the Si Phan Don region of southern Laos. Gregory, 34, and Joanne Minns, 35, have been travelling through Asia and Australia since they left Montreal last summer. The couple recently opted to make a 160-kilometre trip from the Thai border to Siem Reap, Cambodia, by bus. It took six hours. “Travelling by land ends up costing about one-quarter of the price of flying, but you have to have the time,” he writes.
Offset your trip
When travelling by land or water isn’t an option, Chafe recommends offsetting the carbon emissions produced by the flight. Zerofootprint (http://www.zerofootprint.net), Offsetters (http://www.offsetters.ca), My Climate (http://www.myclimate.org) and Atmosfair (http://www.atmosfair.de) are among the many vendors to choose from. Zerofootprint, a Toronto-based not-for-profit program, announced in May that it had teamed up with Air Canada to offer passengers the chance to purchase carbon offsets for their trip when buying tickets online. By their calculations, a flight from Montreal to London generates the equivalent of 3.13 tonnes of carbon dioxide, about the same as driving a 2005 Honda Civic 20,000 kilometres.
Except for 10 per cent covering overhead, “all of the money goes toward a tree-planting initiative near Vancouver,” says Deborah Kaplan, Zerofootprint’s executive director. The program is restoring forest on degraded land. Hundreds of offsets were sold in the first three weeks of the Air Canada program.
Canadians are evidently willing to pay for their travel sins. The Conference Board of Canada reports that seven out of 10 Canadians said they were willing to pay $10 for every $1,000 in airfare on government-approved forms of green energy in Canada.
Merliee Hughes, 29, bought offsets from Offsetters last year when she travelled from Vancouver to London. “If I were to be truly environmental, I would do more local travelling and skip the foreign travel altogether,” she says. “But I happen to love foreign travel and I hope that buying carbon offsets is minimizing the damage that I will do.”
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