Although I consider myself a travel writer for all purposes on this site and associated business ventures, my formal education was in engineering with focus in the environmental sciences. Outside of this site I have worked on topics including green engineering, alternative fuels research, and design of advanced water treatment systems, but one thing I have not done was talk about it in articles here on Living the Dream.
When it comes down to it, one of the reasons I've not done so is because, quite frankly, I wouldn't know where to begin. Not only that, any time a writer brings up a conservation issue, like the recent boycott of a travel blogger's conference over the inclusion of dolphin encounters, the topics are almost always discussed with unwarranted anger and made up facts designed to suit the author's need. Put those two reasons together and you have a good explanation for why I (mostly) stay out of it.
Ever since returning from our long-term trip, one lingering question stayed in my mind and it was one that I couldn't just let go. What I wanted to know was simply this: How bad for the environment was our trip?
I ran some numbers to find out, and you may not like the results I found.
So How Much CO2 Do You Release While Traveling?
To calculate our CO2 equivalent release when traveling, I ran some numbers through some online calculators just to see how varied they'd be (keeping in mind they're not the most accurate measurement tool). We estimated our miles traveled via air, bus, train, and vans/taxis (you can see our numbers from our RTW Tally here), and also put in rough approximations for our accommodations (small boutique hotels and hostels equivalent to medium apartment complexes) and meals (mix between meat and vegetarian). Although there is far more that goes into calculating your carbon emissions than just these, the previous categories are the major ones that need to be considered.
After plugging our data into the calculators, we ended up with the following results:
Taking an average on these three, we come to 49.3 tons of CO2 equivalent per person per year. But how does that compare to when we're at home?
We re-ran the numbers with our situation for a year at home and came up with the following results:
- Nature.org predicted 34 tons of CO2 equivalent per person per year.
- Terrapass.com predicted 38 tons of CO2 equivalent per person per year.
- Berkley's Cool Climate calculator predicted 51 tons of CO2 equivalent per person per year.
Averaging these out and we get a rough approximation of 41 tons of CO2 equivalent per person per year. Overall, our CO2 release when traveling is only 20% more than it is when we are at home.
I was a bit shocked by this as I thought it would be much higher, but when I looked into the details more it started to make more sense.
The Differences Between Traveling Full Time and Being at Home
The biggest contributors to our CO2 emissions when traveling were transportation at 43 tons of CO2 equivalent (88% of the total) and only 3 tons of CO2 equivalent due to accommodations. Compare this to our emissions at home of 20 tons of CO2 equivalent (49% of the total) with 16 tons of CO2 equivalent due to accommodations/living and you can see a distinct shift (admittedly, I think this one may be skewed too high but let's say it is accurate).
I always thought that long-term travel would be much higher on transportation emissions, but when it comes down to it we are travelers at heart, and even when we're at home we log significant miles both on the road (commuting to jobs) and flying (business travel plus international vacations). To get to the bottom on how long-term travel differs from being at home, it is easier to look at the main emission categories individually:
Airfare: When looking at our airfare mileage from traveling, our flights when at home are high in miles because of traveling round-trip (on the order of 20,000 miles per year), whereas our long-term trip we only traveled one way (on the order of 40,000 miles). In the end our air miles were significantly higher, but were only about double what we'd normally log at home thanks to traveling overland and only retracing our steps for part of the journey. Net Gain in Traveling: 23 tons of CO2 equivalent.
Overland Travel: We logged a serious amount of overland travel in our long-term trip (at least 20,000 miles), but a significant portion was through buses or rail travel. Compare that with a 20+ mile commute to work each day in a private vehicle and you end up with similar miles overall, but with shared emissions with dozens or hundreds of other people. It would be hard to approximate emissions from one category to another, but I suspect it will probably be about equal. Net Gain in Traveling: 0 tons of CO2 equivalent.
Accommodations: At home we would likely have a large condo or detached home of 1,000+ square feet just to ourselves. While traveling we would have a 100 square foot room in a building shared with 20-50 others. Although we try to be incredibly energy conscious both at home and when traveling, the sheer size of our living space at home versus accommodations abroad would be a significant difference as major emission points, like lighting and heating, are significantly reduced when shared with others. Net Decrease in Traveling: 15 tons of CO2 equivalent.
Food: Most calculators do not give flexibility in estimating your emissions due to growing food, so we unfortunately had to call it even as the types of food we ate while traveling were no different from at home (roughly 50% of meals including meat and 50% vegetarian, as organic/least processed as we can). If I had to guess; however, I would say that our emissions would decrease significantly when traveling thanks to food often being grown much closer to the cities than they are in the USA. But since this emission category is quite low anyway, we're ignoring it for now. Net Gain in Traveling: 0 tons of CO2 equivalent.
Overall, when you look at these categories individually, it makes sense that our traveling emission rate is roughly 8-10 tons of CO2 equivalent higher than it is at home and the increase in air miles and decrease in accommodation size being two of the major contributions.
How Many Trees to Offset a Long-Term Trip?
After determining how much emissions our trip was responsible for, the next question I had was about the kind of offsets that are available. Naturally, my first thought went to planting trees as they are able to naturally sequester CO2 while also making oxygen for us to breathe (I like to breathe and lowering CO2 in the atmosphere is needed, so this seemed like a great idea).
The uptake of CO2 within a tree varies based on the tree type, location, and age of the tree, but rough sources calculate a CO2 uptake anywhere from 6 kg/year for a young tree and 22 kg/year for a mature tree on average. Other sources have rough numbers of 1 ton of CO2 equivalent per 40 trees per year, which matches up pretty well with these figures.
If you assume a tree has a 40 year lifespan, and a rough figure of 20 kg CO2 removed per year, per tree over that time, you'll come up with the need to plant roughly 60 trees to offset our travels. To do this, we'd have to spend roughly $100 to $1,000 depending on the organization, tree, and location. Considering the wide array of information out there, I'd probably lean towards the higher end for pure accuracy and likelihood of the tree actually growing to maturity (no point spending the money if the trees don't survive).
Overall, this is an interesting goal and one I look to completing in the near future.
As much as offsetting our travels is fine and potentially do-able based on this assessment, we still have to talk about the elephant in the room - we would still need to plant about 50 trees per year based on our lifestyle when we're at home, and that is just not cool.
Overall, We Were Bad to Begin With
When it comes down to it, an at home release of 40 tons of CO2 equivalent per year is awful. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It is really, really bad.
To give you an example, the average American releases 20 tons of CO2 equivalent per year whereas the world's average is just around 4-5 tons per person, per year.
Americans produce five times more CO2 than the world's average, and we are double that.
Let's tackle the problem of us first. Our airfare emissions by themselves often exceed the average for most Americans, and this one is likely the reason that sets us apart from most others in this country. To put it bluntly, most Americans don't travel like we do, and when looking at it from an emissions standpoint, that is probably a good thing.
But taking a broader approach and looking at Americans in general, you can really see what the impact of having your own home, individual cars, and long commutes does on your average emissions: they skyrocket.
In fact, if you were to rerun the numbers with the average of 20 tons of CO2 equivalent per year, you would get the need for 2,000 trees per American for their life. At over 300 million people in the US alone, that is 600 billion trees that need to be planted for just our own country. Compare that to a recent estimate of there being just over 400 billion trees on the planet, for everyone in the world plus everything else that breathes oxygen and produces CO2, and you can start to understand the true nature of this problem.
(Note: Higher estimates put the number of trees in the low trillions, but consider the US population is only 4% of the world's population, and atmospheric CO2 is going up, we have serious issues going on.)
As for me, this is where I have to end my assessment, because my knowledge of this topic is more on the emissions side and not as much on the sequestration side. But no matter which way you look at it we all could do better, and every traveler out there, no matter how great they are at minimizing waste, is altering the world's natural environment one plane flight at a time.
Unfortunately, us traveling long-term did not help the matter one bit.
What You Can Do To Help Offset Your Carbon Footprint
The only question that remains to be addressed is what you, as a world traveler, can do to offset your carbon footprint when exploring the world.
The following are a few ideas to get you started:
- Take a big trip: As we established in this article, our long-term trip was only a 20% increase in our carbon footprint and that jump was mostly due to air travel. Had we visited all of the destinations on short trips, with many international flights, our carbon footprint would have been significantly higher. Therefore, if you can visit more in one region in a single trip while traveling overland, the better off you'll be. Naturally, this one would only work if you did one big international trip instead of two, three, or more in the same vacation cycle (per year, per two years, etc).
- Go slower: Although air travel is likely the biggest source of carbon in your travels, moving overland contributes a lot too. Stay longer in each place you visit to minimize the distance traveled by vehicle. When you do travel, take public transportation that has lower emissions per person than private vehicles which can be, at times, just as bad as air travel.
- Reduce your accommodation size: The more you share your space with others, the more your emissions due to housing will decrease. If you are renting an entire apartment that is 1,000 square foot, your emissions will be notably higher than those who stay in a dorm or private room in a hostel that hosts a few dozen people per night.
- Eat locally: As long as you are traveling outside of the USA and eating at places that source foods from local markets (which is pretty much everywhere), you're going to do okay on this one.
- Minimize plastic water bottle use, and recycle: I'm not going to tell you to use a SteriPEN on every water source you come across, and that is because UV doesn't get rid of everything that could be bad in a water source. But whatever you can do to minimize your use of plastic bottles will help significantly. This is especially true in countries where the tap water is perfectly safe to drink or if you are out in nature where chlorine tablets or a SteriPEN would suffice. Taking the time to understand what is the best source in each destination will significantly offset your negative contribution to the environment, although may not get rid of it entirely.
- WWOOF: Okay, you won't be offsetting your emissions by working on an organic farm unless you managed to both fund and plant dozens of trees, but giving up some of your time to help a farm allows for growth in the responsible / organic movement as a whole and you may even take away some new habits that will help down the line.
- Participate in reputable offset programs: Lowering your emissions to world averages as a traveler is next to impossible. In order to offset your emissions, purchase credits or tree offsets from reputable programs. In this day and age, this may end up being the only option for those who travel frequently to truly make an impact.
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Don't be a travel writer: When it comes down to it, we suck at trying to save the environment thanks to our frequent travels. If you want to be an ethical citizen of the world based on your carbon emissions, the career of a travel writer may not be for you. Or, you can become a travel writer, ignore this, and go ahead and write about the killing of captive dolphins instead; we all know that putting together priorities as an industry has never been our strong suit.
- As an interesting side note, there are also travel blogging conferences. I did some rough numbers on this one and calculated that 1,000 attendees could contribute as much CO2 release as about 50 Americans for a whole year in just the flights to get to the destination for one weekend, but that is another argument I'll probably get yelled at for bringing up, too.
After performing this analysis, I realized that it is time to start investing in those offset programs and working towards reducing my carbon footprint here at home. Looking back at all that I have done, I realize that I have a lot of catching up to do.
