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Tips for climate-fair travelling
- Opting for other modes of transport than flying means to actively protect our world’s climate. Avoid flights whenever there are alternative and more climate friendly means of transportation that are more environmentally friendly. Especially short-haul flights strain the environment disproportionally, as take-off and landing waste additional energy.
- Land-based forms of transport are much more climate-friendly and provide the possibility to enjoy the scenery around you. When you travel within Europe or when you booked a roundtrip, travelling by airplane can be completely avoided. By choosing interesting stopover destinations, the journey itself may already become an integral part of the vacation.
- Try to fly less frequently and stay in the same place for a longer time. This way, the local population benefits from longer stays, as you use more local services. At the same time, you have more time to meet them and get a better understanding of the local culture. Therefore, an intensive, long-distance vacation every five to ten years can have a more positive impact on you and your hosts than several short-term trips.
If you want to explore a remote country’s culture and nature and cannot avoid taking a plane, use the possibility of paying a voluntary climate levy. There are some criteria you should pay attention to while choosing a serious provider of climate levies:
- Chosen climate protection projects comply with the "CDM Gold Standard". This standard was developed by environmental organisations and guarantees that emissions are being saved traceably, sustainably and in due consideration of social and ecological guidelines. www.cdmgoldstandard.org
- The emissions calculator uses the Radiative Forcing Index (RFI), a factor that takes into consideration the increased greenhouse effect of pollutants in higher altitudes. The RFI of at least 2.7 is adequate.
- A reliable provider points out that refraining from a flight is best to save the climate and recommends to replace short-distance flights (up to about 1,000 km) by more environmentally friendly means of transportation such as trains or buses. Paying a climate levy is not a legitimation to not change the way of travelling and thus continue to pollute the environment.
- The following websites below are recommended for easy online compensation. Among them, a (German only) free-to-use app for climate-fair traveling, that was developed by Klima-Kollekte, calculates mobility-related CO2-emissions. It helps to find climate-friendly alternatives for transportation and to compensate for unavoidable emissions with just a few clicks: www.klima-kollekte.de/app.
