Establishing new travel a-l/t-titude
It is the time to look back at 2018, to reflect on your travel patterns and offset carbon emissions – especially from flights.
The KG emission estimates shown are for direct flights. For multi-leg itineraries, they certainly underestimate the real emissions. The numbers presented on the map are based on research by Larsson & Kamb. They find a global average CO2 emission of 90 g per person km, caused by burning fossil fuel. In addition, greenhouse effects are caused by so-called non-CO2 emissions, including contrails (water vapour) and emissions of aerosols (small particles). These effects are short-term but potent. The scientific certainty for how to treat the non-CO2 emissions is very low, but we use the best current estimates, which suggest that one should add a further 90% to the CO2 emissions to account for these effects. This gives a total emission of 170 g per person km in CO2 equivalents. Please note the emission numbers here are not as precise as they may seem. However, they give a relatively good estimate of the magnitude of the emissions from air travel.
As we have pointed out: the cost of flying is the price of the ticket plus the price of offsetting the carbon. How about making that your 2019 travel mantra?
