It’s often a challenge for those who are trying to be both keen travellers and eco-friendly citizens, what with budget airlines flying to all corners of the earth, producing tonnes of carbon emissions every single minute of every day. To be completely honest, there’s not much that one person alone can do to prevent thousands of flights from taking off every day, but there are still some ways that allow you to see the world and not be too harmful to the environment.
A lot of the things you do at home to prevent damage to the environment can be applied to your travelling, so there’s no need to take drastic measures. Buying local produce when you’re abroad reduces thousands of potential air miles and most importantly, the number of planes needed to transport food, whilst also benefitting local industries.
A major factor of being eco-friendly lies with transportation. “Even though there are far more automobiles on the road than aeroplanes in the sky,” writes Greg Roza, “air travel as a whole produces nearly twice as much greenhouse gases per mile per passenger than other forms of intercity travel.” So for the extremely eco-friendly traveller, it might be worth searching for alternatives to flights. Electric trains, biodiesel coach journeys and even boats will inevitably take longer and may hurt your purse strings a little more, but they are ultimately kinder to the environment. For long-haul journeys, flying seems to be the most convenient mode of transport even if they incur huge carbon footprints. So to alleviate your damage, you can always resort to more eco-friendly ways of getting around once you’ve reached your destination, which should be researched thoroughly in advance.
An obvious point is to be respectful of your surroundings and to clean up after yourself and recycle as much as you can in order to reduce the amount of landfill. National Geographic also recommend that “if dispersed camping is permitted, use pre-existing camps whenever possible to lessen erosion” and preserve as much of the natural landscape as you can.
If you want to have as eco-friendly a holiday as possible, then it’s essential that you do your research in advance. Guide books such as Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide series have specialist knowledge on cutting down your carbon footprint and include comprehensive hotel, airline and attraction recommendations in their pages. Internet forums also include a wealth of tips from travellers which you can implement into your own agenda.
Admittedly, it’s very difficult in this day and age to keep your carbon footprint to a minimum, as cost often outweighs your good intentions. Keeping eco-friendly travel cheap is quite a challenge, but if you book your journey far enough in advance and research it thoroughly enough, then you may well succeed in not only achieving an inexpensive challenge, but also an environmentally friendly experience.
