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The Case for the Travel Carbon Footprint
Once a relatively obscure spot on the globe, Greenland has been making headlines lately as its听ice听sheet听melts at an alarming rate. (Photo: the-lightwriter/iStock)

Travel Is Worth the Carbon Footprint

There have been countless reports denouncing travel in the fight against climate change. This environmentalist thinks you should consider the bigger picture.

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The Case for the Travel Carbon Footprint
(Photo: the-lightwriter/iStock)

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Our little rubber Zodiac boat听wove around icebergs eight stories high and entered a fjord flanked by high mountain basins. Jagged peakscalled nunataks听rose 5,000 feet into the Arctic clouds, forming a skyline to rival any Patagonia silhouette. Our native east Greenland听guide, Julius Nielson, cut the motor and pointed to two fleeting spouts of water to our left. A humpback whale breached, her calf surfacing beside her a second later. Drifting beside their rhythmic rising, our small group was awed into silence.

But it was far from quiet on these northern waters. The explosive breath of the two creatures echoed against the intermittent thundering created by restless tidewater glaciers听and another sound: the soft crackling of thousand-year-old air bubbles streaming to the surface, released from icebergs broken off from the vast Greenland ice sheet.

I noticed tears falling down my cheeks. This place had staggered me.

The Case for the Travel Carbon Footprint
Boating through Sermilik Fjord (Ralph Lee Hopkins)

I was boating through Sermilik Fjord as part of a trip with , a company that specializes in responsible adventure travel. Once a relatively obscure spot on the globe, Greenland has been making headlines lately for both trivial reasons () and consequential ones. Its听ice听sheet听is melting at an alarming rate. But those science-heavy climate-change stories often fail to convey the magnitude of this place. Even as someone who considers myself a conscious environmentalist鈥攈aving gotten a master鈥檚 degree in environmental studies and spent the past decade doing advocacy work鈥攖his in-person experience made me want to enact more serious change than any article or statistic has inspired.

So when I was sitting in the Reykjavik airport in Iceland on the way home and saw an article from pop听up in my feed about how the best thing we can all do to combat climate change is stop traveling, I couldn鈥檛 help but feel irked. It听was spurred in part by a recent that found that the environmental impact of tourism is responsible for 8听percent of global emissions听from transport, shopping, and food. (It should be noted that calculate air travel as only 2 to 2.5 percent of global emissions.) The piece was authored听by an established travel writer who鈥檚 already gotten to see the world, and it was essentially telling people that they should feel guilty for doing the same.听Frankly, it pissed me off.

Not only that, but it missed an important point. Travel is what opens our eyes to what鈥檚 at risk鈥攆rom fragile ecosystems and disappearing wildlife to warming oceans and people struggling鈥攁nd inspires听us to fight for it. Could seeing a place actually be worth the 8听percent of global emissions? Especially when that number, while not insignificant, seems diminutive next to the for our buildings and homes听or the . In fact, mounting studies show that tourism plays a big role in preservation of the natural world.

The research on how travel has a positive effect on conservation is still relatively new, and one of the most compelling ways to measure it quantitatively is through people鈥檚 willingness to pay to see and conserve our environment. 鈥淒ollar value is the best way to turn heads to show that nature is valuable,鈥 says Court Whelan, director of sustainability for Natural Habitat 国产吃瓜黑料s. A from the World Travel and听Tourism Council shows that wildlife tourism generates five times more revenue than illegal wildlife poaching worldwide. Thanks to tourism, an elephant is than dead; India鈥檚 tiger population has increased in major part because a single wild tiger is in tourism; and several experts agree that gorillas are right now because of tourism. Other similar studies abound for pandas, one-horned rhinos, wolves, polar bears, and other species at risk.

鈥淭here鈥檚 no amount of PowerPoints or David Attenborough specials or magazine articles that come even close to having a personal experience with the things we鈥檙e protecting,鈥澨齭ays James Sano, vice president of travel, tourism, and conservation for the听, which protects wildlife and vulnerable places and communities.听鈥淧eople can read about Glacier National Park, but that doesn鈥檛 hold a candle to someone actually going there.鈥 Those personal experiences, at destinations听like Glacier鈥攚hose namesakes are melting so fast that 听it will have to be renamed鈥攕pur new behaviors toward conservation, and the WWF has the data to prove it. 鈥淭ravelers contribute [money]听at significantly higher levels to our conservation work, on the order of 27 times more compared to those who don鈥檛 travel,鈥 Sano says about those registered with the company鈥檚 membership program.

Not only can travel help enact change on a personal level, but it can initiate change on听a federal level, too. Once governments see how many tourism dollars are going into their natural attractions, they often realize the economic viability in preserving them.听鈥淢any countries know that without natural resources and cultural resources, tourism doesn鈥檛 work,鈥 says Casey Hanisko, president of the , citing recent efforts in Jordan and Japan.听鈥淚n听Jordan, the development of the Jordan Trail as a tourism asset focused on adventure travel has听ensured that the land and communities around it are protected,鈥 says Hanisko. Meanwhile, in Japan, 鈥渨hile its cultural appreciation for nature makes it more naturally focused on preservation, with almost 30 percent of its lands protected, its aging population has made the country more focused on adventure-tourism development, to support a need to bring in international visitors to replace their declining domestic-tourism market.鈥

The Case for the Travel Carbon Footprint
The trip鈥檚 native east Greenland听guide, Julius Nielson (Ralph Lee Hopkins)

In Greenland,听out on Sermilik as we followed in the ripples left behind by the whales, Natural Habitat鈥檚 Nielson told us that this fjord used to freeze solid in winter with sea ice, making a nearly seamless connection between his village of Tiniteqilaaq and the glaciers descending from the ice sheet across the channel. That ice sheet is听the second largest in the world, behind Antarctica, and accounts for the vast majority of the polar ice cap. It鈥檚 two miles thick at its center听and stretches 1,500 miles north to south, covering 80 percent of Greenland.

But Sermilik no longer freezes in winter, Nielson said. And this past summer, scientists measured unprecedented melt of the ice sheet while watching parts of its center . Most of the icebergs we threaded through broke from the Helheim Glacier, just north, which has been calving from its sister, the Midgard Glacier, that seals off the fjord to the east. Neilson relayed a conversation he had last week with a sailboat captain who has听long given tours to this isolated region and believes that in ten years the Midgard will be gone completely, that he鈥檒l be able to sail straight through the fjord to the ocean. Nielson thinks it鈥檚 more like seven years.

As we passed by these ancient pieces of ice devolving into sea, the low clouds muted everything to gray. After my eyes adjusted, I was struck by a kaleidoscope of color, with each layer of ice taking on a different shade. Then the clouds suddenly parted听and revealed a bright blue sky that put our surroundings into new focus.

Watching the clouds part, I was struck by a feeling of heartbreaking clarity, similar to that of understanding something fully for the first time. It鈥檚 this moment that Sam Ham, a professor of communication psychology at the University of Idaho, identifies as the transformative lynchpin. Ham, who has been studying environmental interpretation in tourism for nearly 20 years,听explains that it鈥檚 not just the act of travel that will lead to measurable transformation听but the interpretation of the experience.

Ham pioneered this concept when he consulted with adventure-cruise company in 1998 on its small-boat Gal谩pagos Islands program. In 1997, owner Sven Lindblad had a hunch that if the company asked its passengers to donate to local conservation efforts at the same time they were asked to tip the crew at the end of the journey, they鈥檇 jump at the chance. Lindblad raised $50,000 that year听but believed the sum听could have been听much higher. He brought in Ham, who designed a new approach that was all about helping clients interpret Charles Darwin and the animals听and connecting passengers to the environment. At no point were travelers asked to give, but donations to the 听increased by a staggering 270 percent the next year.

The Case for the Travel Carbon Footprint
The town of Tasiilaq in southeastern Greenland (Ralph Lee Hopkins)

Upon returning home from our close-up with the impacts of climate change in Greenland, my fellow traveler听Kim Borovikfound herself imagining the flight path of an aging banana she bought in the tiny Tasiilaq grocery store while there, leading her to a habit of basing her produce purchases off the origin labels in her own supermarket. Another new friend from the trip, Linnet Tse, began conscious attempts to reduce food waste, which of global emissions,听by being more strategic with purchases and eating out less. As for me, I dove headfirst into the rabbit hole that is carbon offsetting. I鈥檇 never offset my travel before, but now I wanted to figure out how to do it for my upcoming flights听to Tanzania.

I found numerous companies that will calculate travel emissions and offer projects that travelers can invest in to offset their trips. I decided to use , a Swiss nonprofit that鈥檚 certified with strict third-party auditors like CDM, Gold Standard, and Plan Vivo. The website provides options for calculating individual parts of your trip, from a flight to a car ride, as well as听trip鈥檚 entire carbon footprint. Carbon emissions are measured in metric tons, so offsets are measured in equivalent reductions of metric tons, which are priced anywhere from . My flights from Missoula, Montana, to the Kilimanjaro airport via Amsterdam weighed in at 4.7 tons of CO2, which translates to a cost of $135, a shockingly small price to pay and in this case went to helping small farmers with reforestation in Nicaragua.

The effectiveness of carbon offsetting has seen , which is why it鈥檚 crucial to choose projects with third-party certifications. But spending my money on programslike reforestation, renewable energy, and听water-filtration systems for villages in developing countries, so that people don鈥檛 have to cut wood and burn it to sanitize drinking water, are all worthy add-ons in听an effort to be听a more conscious traveler in general, whether that means flying less or听more thoughtfully.

Not every travel experience will be transformative or lead to behavior change, and offsetting flights doesn鈥檛 give听us carte blanche to turn up the taps, but the answer is not to stop traveling altogether. In fact, nowadays, there are as many answers as there are innovative solutions. One of my answers is understanding the impact, both bad and good, of the trips we choose to take. When that understanding leads to concrete steps toward听investing in climate-change solutions, or when our valuing a place or species through tourism is a driving force in conserving it, then yes, travel is worth the carbon footprint.

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