My 2023 Travel Emissions — Wrapped
This December you may have noticed a larger than usual influx of year-end summaries of your activity on a number of different platforms. Some, like Spotify, you might have expected or even looked forward to, while others might have completely creeped you out with the amount of useful or useless information they had about you. As someone that’s been compiling my personal year-end music and movie charts in the comfort of my own mind, I found some of these ‘wrapped’ emails failed to answer one key question — ‘so what?’ What does the fact that I spent 8.5 hours editing my fantasy football team mean? What do I do with this information? Is it good, bad or, as I suspect, a total waste of 8.5 hours?
Well, here’s a ‘wrapped’ I hope can help. Since the start of 2023, I’ve been tracking my travel emissions in the hope of getting a clearer picture of how much my travels are contributing to the climate crisis and what I can do about them now, in 2024 and beyond.
Here are some highlights, with benchmarks to anchor against.
In 2023, I emitted an estimated 3,862 kg (3.9 Tonnes) of CO2 equivalent GHGs
This number is higher than the per capita travel emissions of any country. Numbers are a bit hard to come by, but if we assume half of all transport is personal and half is goods/freight (source), Americans have the highest average per capita emissions at 2.6 Tonnes (source).
So I’m worse than the average American, but averages are a poor way to get a real sense of emissions. Higher income groups, for one, tend to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of emissions. In the US, the richest decile emits around 14 Tonnes per capita on road transport alone. (source).
93% of my emissions came from air travel, which consisted of 17 flights
This is very high. The average annual number of flights per US person works out to 6.5 (source), when you factor in those that don’t fly regularly. This goes up to 14 flights a year for the 12% of people that take more than 6 flights a year — the frequent flyers-like myself I guess. So I’m in the upper quartile even here — something I hope to rectify in 2024.
Less than 5% of my emissions came from road travel, far below the average.
Living in the Netherlands helped reduce my CO2 emissions from road travel (including public transport, car and coach travel) since most of the travel could take place in EVs or trains powered largely by renewable electricity. In total, I emitted around 0.5kg per day.
I travelled over 6,000km by train, accounting for only 60 kg of CO2 emissions.
Ok, the journeys were stressful and inconvenient in some cases (read more about it here), but for the emissions savings (an equivalent trip by plane would be 1,100kg or nearly 20 times as much), it was definitely worth it.
Around 2/3rd of all my travel emissions came from leisure travel or vacations.
This was due to exceptional circumstances, since I had flights booked before the pandemic which I had to take before they expired. I did manage to reduce my business travel emissions to under 200kg by favouring local contracts, train travel and online co-working. Honestly, it’s a pain to limit yourself in this way, and this number might increase in 2024, but I will try to do that in moderation.
A quarter of all my emissions came from visiting family.
This is probably quite a bit higher than average because both myself and my partner’s families live thousands of miles away from us. This also does not include the emissions from families visiting us. This part is unavoidable for us, as there’s no substitute for family time.
The ‘cost to offset’ my emissions would be between $150-$750, depending on who you ask.
This would be if offsets were anything other than a clever rouse. But either way, it’s useful to know how much more my travels are costing the earth. The smaller number is laughably small when put in context, but I will be looking to donate the higher amount to an appropriate climate-related charity.
In 2024, my target is to stay under 3 Tonnes of emissions from travel, while cutting down in other areas.
While this number is still quite high, I do believe we have to set realistic targets for ourselves. Every reduction is valuable, and knowing the numbers is a great start.
Would you like to set yourself a travel emissions budget as well? Now’s a great time to set this up for 2024.
There are several websites you can use. I used Google Flights for the flight-related emissions and Sustainable Travel International to cross verify and estimate the emissions from the other modes. Measuring your emissions is a great first step to understanding and changing your behaviour. It’s also a great way to alleviate climate anxiety, because the more you know, the more you can control.
Have you already begun a similar tracking process? Let me know in the comments — I’d like to know how I stack up to other people.
