SHOULD I KEEP FLYING?

It's been a while since my last post. I've been to Washington D.C. and back since then and Make Travel Fair has continued to develop in a positive direction. I met up with the Geotourism department at National Geographic in Washington and learnt a little more about the work that they are doing to promote sustainble tourism. learn more »

The Make Travel Fair website has begun to have a facelift over the last month. Hopefully once all of our pages are updated it will be much easier to navigate and more visually stimulating for our users.

The debate on whether or not we should keep flying, and how we can reduce our carbon emissions has been hot for sometime now and I thought it's time that Make Travel Fair jumped in with their thoughts.

Travelling internationally means long distance journeys, and if we’re honest, journeys by air. For ease of use and minimum travelling time this form of transport wins hands down. Increasing attention is being given to ‘slow travel’, celebrating the romance and rewards of a low-carbon journey by land or sea, and this option seems to be the obvious choice for cleansing our eco-conscience where time is of low regard, and distances are relatively small. For many of us though who crave the exotic far flung corners of the globe air travel is the reality that we are faced with. How can we balance this international curiosity with our concern for the environment?

Offsetting carbon costs through organisations such as Climate Care that run and develop carbon saving projects to compensate for your extravagance is one option. Although the credibility and consistency of companies offering this service has been recently proved inconsistent read more at Times Online »

Hopefully by the autumn The Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will have a quality mark established to standardize the calculations for these initiatives.

Carbon rationing is another suggestion that enables individual carbon allowances to be traded so that over-producers can distribute their footprints across the ‘carbon accounts’ of those not exhausting their allowance.

Make Travel Fair believes though that inciting international debate on the environmental effects of air travel is a great way for carbon-heavy international travellers to contribute positively to the problem. If we are aware of the carbon cost we generate when we travel (by using a carbon calculator such as the one available at Climate Care) it can go a long way to encouraging us to think more carefully about the way we travel once we reach our destination. Until an alternative fuel is sourced or a form of teleportation is developed! Perhaps the best we can do is to help raise awareness, education and encourage the diffusion of knowledge on the subject.

Environmental responsibility is only one corner of the responsible travel triangle and adopting other responsible travel practices is a positive step in another direction for the travel industry, and just as important. We may not have all the answers to fair travel debates but through global communication of global problems we may just be able to reach someone who does. When combined with offsetting carbon costs this approach may well be a more effective route to finding a solution than simply restricting our educated minds from travelling the world, and from conveying our concerns to the rest of the world.