Alex Mungall was once a fairly .
However, the 57-year-old decided in 2019 that, due to concerns about , he would never take another flight.
“I can’t in good conscience think that I’m leaving behind a legacy of fires and floods and people displaced from their homes and unable to grow food in anywhere near the tropics and this sort of thing,” he told SBS.
“It’s a horrific situation that the world is facing from one generation to the next. And yeah, I just don’t want to be part of it anymore.”
Mungall, who lives in Melbourne, said he plans to stick to his promise — even if it’s “heartbreaking” to think of not seeing family and friends in his home country of Scotland.
Researchers are calling on holidaymakers to consider avoiding flying on end-of-year trips as the carbon footprint of the world’s tourism industry continues to grow.
New research published in the Nature Communications journal found carbon emissions from global tourism grew from 3.7 gigatonnes to 5.2 gigatonnes over ten years — with aviation, utilities and private vehicles the sector’s top three sources of emissions.
The study also found a significant disparity in the per-capita tourism emissions between high and low-income nations.
Associate Professor Ya-Yen Sun, a sustainable tourism researcher from the University of Queensland and lead author of the study, told SBS the rapid expansion in travel demand has meant carbon emissions from tourism activities now account for 9 per cent of the world’s total.
“Our study tracks tourism expenditures and the local energy profile of 175 countries from 2009 to 2019. Our analysis shows that the global tourism in fact cost a lot of emissions,” she said.
Sun said the emissions growth rate for tourism was 3.5 per cent per year during the decade, while global emissions increased by 1.5 per cent.
“So, aviation is the elephant in the room. This particular sector is very hard to decarbonise. But at the same time, our demand for aviation travel is very strong.”
According to the study, the United States, China and India are responsible for 60 per cent of the total increase in tourism emissions.
Australia also ranked in the top 20 countries, which together accounted for three-quarters of global tourism’s carbon emissions in 2019.
The ‘no-fly’ movement
There is a growing global movement of people who, like Mungall, are opting out of air travel due to concerns about greenhouse gas emissions.
The ‘no-fly’ movement is trying to address and raise awareness about the climate impacts of flying.
The #flygskam or ‘flying shame’ movement, which emerged from Sweden in 2018 has also drawn attention to flying emissions in recent years and encouraged people to make pledges on social media to go a year without flying or avoid it completely.
Mungall said the offset options by airlines aren’t convincing environmentalists.
“It’s an accounting trick, really. And also those offsets are really not reliable. That forest could burn down in the next forest fire and the accounting has still happened, but the offset hasn’t happened. They’re not reliable and I don’t trust them,” he said.
While options such as biofuels and electrical aircraft are being developed, Sun said aviation technology for sustainable flying isn’t progressing fast enough.
“Those solutions are not really near. I mean, we have to wait maybe around 20 or 30 years of time in order for those solutions to be made available across all the airlines,” she said.
How to reduce travel emissions
Sun said prioritising domestic travel can help reduce emissions but there are also ways to make international travel more sustainable.
“If you have to do an international trip, then please combine multiple trips into one. In other words, if you need to do three shorter international trips, make it one longer trip so that you can cut back the use of transport,” she said.
However, the study’s authors also say the pressure to change behaviour shouldn’t be left solely to the consumer.
They’re also calling on the government to set up a national tourism emissions inventory and to support initiatives to make domestic travel more sustainable, including building more charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs).
“We feel there are some hopes if we can convince people to travel more domestically because the EV will take care of the private vehicle emissions issues,” Sun said.
