Feel Guilty about Flying? C’mon!

When you are in India the only time you hear the word shaming is in “body shaming” where self-proclaimed critics criticize celebrities for not losing weight .. touchdown Netherlands and I heard about a different kind of shaming… “flight shaming”. In the sustainability series, lets talk about “Flight Shaming”.

Flygskam or flight shame gained its prominence in Sweden,2017 which motivates people to stop/replace their flights to lower carbon emission. Globally, Airlines are responsible for approximately 2.5% of carbon emission. A research says that if aviation was a country it would have been world’s top 10 green house emitter. The International Civil Aviation Organization forecasts that aviation emissions could grow by 300–700% by 2050. With exponentially rising middle class in Asia air travel has become more achievable and hence more prominent and now contributes a major part of air travel globally.

An economy-class return flight from London to New York emits an estimated 0.67 tonnes of CO2 per passenger, according to the calculator from the UN’s civil aviation body, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). That’s equivalent to about the same as those caused by someone living in Ghana over a year.

Though aviation industry proclaims that they are trying to reduce their carbon emissions by either manufacturing more fuel-efficient aircraft engines, using bio fuels, reducing weights in flights, or setting up various kinds of targets to reduce carbon emission in coming years but how much will contain carbon emission will only be seen in future.

While sustainability efforts in most of the sectors are likely to bring down the environmental footprint, rapid expansion of aviation means that its contribution is likely to increase. Let’s talk with Indian domestic aviation data in perspective. As per data by DGCA,the Indian regulatory body for Aviation, number of passengers carried by domestic airlines during Jan — Sept 2014 was 49 million against 105 million during the same period in 2019. While this may look a great economic indicator, it doesn’t have great environmental impacts. Once we consider a fact that new additions are more on shorter hauls, which has more impact that longer ones, it looks ever worse.

So is being regressive the way ahead! Not exactly. As per a survey by UBS in US, Germany, France and UK 21%, of the 6000 people surveyed, have reduced their flights they took in 2018. People especially in Sweden have started taking more road/ rail or boats for their travel. Even if each one of us take this into consideration while planning your next air travel, business or leisure, by either taking some other mode of transportation or using skype for meeting or any other way which impacts our environment lesser or take flights responsibly by travelling light or only when important, this post would have had made its impact.

Posting here a beautiful video by #KLM that they launched few months back asking air travelers to #flyresponsibily

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4htp2xxhto

Would be glad to hear what are you doing to stop or reverse climate change.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.