Flight shame isn’t clear cut
Flygskam hard to avoid for flying Kiwis
We all say things we regret. I can assure you, it’s worse when these half-baked thoughts are written down and published and never really go away. One such thought on European short-haul travel that I wrote only five years ago, has aged poorly. It was in rebuttal of the idea of slow travel. In short, I argued it was classist to snub cheap weekend breaks in Europe with low-cost airlines and package holidays in favour of long, meandering vacations where you ‘‘really get to know a destination’’.
And, while I still believe slow travel to be a luxury enjoyed by people rich in time and money, endorsing emissions-pumping flights ‘‘just because they’re cheap’’ for frequent, short-haul breaks away was perhaps less wise.
As the carbon footprint of aviation increases while no governments take responsibility for it, the argument is downright irresponsible. Although, every word I’ve written since has been well and truly on-point, I have increasingly been confronted to do more about my own contribution to the increasing carbon emissions from flying.
The idea of flight-shaming, or flygskam to use its original Swedish moniker, centres on flipping the glamour of air travel on its head and making travellers feel ashamed of choosing a seat on an airplane over one on a train, bus or car. Slowly, but surely, it has gained traction, helped enormously by climate activist Greta Thunberg.
For most European tourists, if you snub airline travel, you can still reach your holiday destinations on the Continent using rail, ferry and bus.
But, in New Zealand, it is far from simple for residents to opt out of air travel if they wish to holiday or visit family and friends abroad. Even so, a return flight from Auckland to Singapore has a warming effect equivalent to 6.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide a person. That is three times the average amount of CO2 a year that scientists say each person should have as an allowance if we are to limit global warming to just two degrees.
Worse still for New Zealand’s tourism industry is it’s unavoidable. If you’re a tourist bound for our island nation, you’re likely flying long-haul on a jet-fuel guzzling plane.
Surely, this guilt could be collectively minimised if we ticked the little box that says ‘‘offset the carbon emissions of this flight’’ when booking a seat on a plane, and improved on our currently abysmal rate of about 4 per cent of the world’s flights that are offset by tree-planting programmes?
Not so, says Magdalena Heuwieser, from Stay Grounded, a global network to stop aviation growth.
‘‘The emissions are in the air at the moment of the flight, and they cannot be taken out.
‘‘In order to stop heating the planet, there is no other pathway than to reduce emissions at the source: that is, not to burn that much fuel, in the case of aviation.’’
Tourism New Zealand bosses admit the industry is well aware of the growing flygskam movement in its developed markets of the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe and North America. The question is, how often does eco-conscious sentiment match buying decisions?
The organisation’s head, Stephen England-Hall, said: ‘‘We want to understand how this is impacting on perceived and actual consumer preferences, and their behaviour as it relates to New Zealand as a destination.
‘‘We need to understand what proportion of people are feeling the sentiment strongly enough to change their behaviour, understand more about how they think about those changes and what that looks like today versus five or 50 years into the future’’.
England-Hall knows that, as technology stands, there isn’t a commercially-viable alternative to jet fuel, so research and investment is better put into understanding consumer behaviours and reactions to the now-obvious effects of climate change.
‘‘What we are seeing is arrivals slowdown on the back of global tourism decline, driven by global economic conditions and uncertainty.’’