3 Things I Learned Living a Climate-Friendly Life
Each action as tiny as it is, has its importance in a global movement.
There is some wake up call that you can’t explain which brings you to the heights you haven’t experienced. I picked up one of these calls in 2015, when France organized the COP21 and designed the Paris agreement. I was touched by the problematics linked to the global warming and ready to contribute, at my little level, to this race against time. In this journey, I learned a lot of things, seriously a lot. 3 of them are the below ones.
- Reinventing your mindset about travels & vacations is not that much complicated
For many years, I have enjoyed discovering new places in the world with the aim to visit as many countries as I could to satisfy my spirit of discovery. Based in Paris, I flew to Yaoundé, New-York, Mumbai, Bali, Cancun, Punta Cana and dozens of cities in Europe… Several times… My flight app clapped my profile as I have made more than 3 times a globe tour 🌍😐. This was before my awareness of the impacts of aviation on climate change. Do you know that a round trip between Paris and New-York generates nearly 1 ton of carbon dioxide per year (could be worst if the plane uses first and business classes) when the average footprint of a global citizen is 7 tons of carbon dioxide per year? In other words, the more you travel the faster you explode your average emissions… And this will not help to achieve the climate-neutrality ambition of Paris agreement.
I set myself apart, to thinking about how I can exit this way of living to jump to a more eco-friendly experience? I found a couple of tips which are now my guiding principles when traveling.
First, I haltered the frequency of intercontinental flights from at least once a year to every 4/5 years now. Yes, it implies de facto less emissions.
Secondly, when opting for an inter-continent travel, I plan to stay longer to visit as much as possible places and countries around. And when happening, I move myself locally with train, public transportations or biking and I consume as much as possible locally. In fact, it is better to spend more time in a region and enjoy slowly the culture it is sharing with you. If you go for this option, use multi-destination ticket: a landing point limiting the distance from your departure point, a good sequencing of local transportation across the region you are visiting till your return point which can limits the distance to your initial departure point.
Thirdly, think local. Why always go far away from your home to discover things / experiences that can be also enjoyable at proximity? Living in Paris, it took me 10 years to decide to make a road trip in the south of France from Toulouse to Menton. From the medieval sites of Nîmes to the Verdon gorges passing by cities on Mediterranean sea like Nice, without any doubt it was one of the best trip I have ever made.
2. Having a couple of insights about the carbon footprint of our actions could be helpful
I used to work for 3 years in the Strategic consulting department of my company and I was involved in a volunteering activity whose the objective was to design a manual of green practices for every worker. To better handle this mission, I read a fantastic book that I recommend warmly How Bad are Bananas? from Mike Berners-Lee. You will easily learn that although an email can be tiny (4g CO2), a mailbox full of tinies emails can easily exceed 135Kg of CO2 in a year, corresponding to driving 200 miles in an average car. And that is only one part of the chain, you should add to the global sum of CO2 generated: the carbon footprint of the computer that sent the email, the carbon footprint of electricity used by the servers (more than 20 million tons of CO2e per year according to McAfee), the electricity you are using to read…
This example shows at what point things are linked in a carbon footprint chain emission and harder to tackle.
To come up with this issue we decided to be as simple and pedagogic as possible to diffuse the change with these couple of takeaways through an enterprise-wide awareness campaign: regular emptying of mailbox, a no-reply policy to mails non requiring it (“thank you, best regards” mails: NO!), limitation of person in copy, usage of a server link instead of a joint document and obviously face-to-face discussion when an email is not necessary… We were quite innovative for the server utilization but it is still confidential. And lastly, we defined a heatmap of the departments’ footprint emissions delivered to their head office with specific objectives to achieve.
One year later, the first results were already palpable.
This experience taught me that it is important to know the impacts of our actions on the environment (and even calculate it if possible) to better take measures to limit them. In fact, you cannot manage what you can’t measure.
3. Being frugal is the new luxury
We will not repeat it enough, we are living in a mass consumption society. Everything is shaped to print in our minds the desire to buy new products, new services, new experiences, new needs that we haven’t imagined to be necessary for us. Consequently the push economy and the pull economy are overheating. In the push economy, firms and producers will maximize their production value chain to flood the markets massively with their products / services in a regular and shorter timeframe. In the pull economy, the concept will be the same at the only difference that the final client will generate a high, regular and shorter demand for the new. In both cases, natural resources are exploited, people around the world are working in execrable conditions and the “old” things are being amassed either in homes, public landfills or anywhere (open pollution).
And who pays the bill at the end? The planet’s climate.
Exiting this hamster wheel is not that easy. I started smoothly.
First by experiencing the benefits of the circular economy. I learned to use second-hand books for my passion of reading, to reuse / share tools for the occasional activities I was involved in… By acting like this, it was an opportunity gain to not fall in the buying habit of our current world and then restraining the carbon footprint chain. It was also a mean to limit the throwing to garbage of products always utilizable.
Secondly by eating and cooking in a responsible way. It was meant for me to buy fresh products coming from farming around my town or at least my living country instead of buying transformed products in supermarket cumulating huge carbon footprint. In a second step, I was making sure that the quantity bought were the right ones in order to not generate wastes.
Thirdly, by wearing just the essential. Getting an enormous wardrobe or an unlimited dressing will make you happy certainly but you should ask yourself if you really need all these stuffs? I did the exercise and the answer was NO. So, I simply started giving or selling the non-necessary things to the people who needed them more than me. I also changed my clothes’ buying approach by buying products of better quality, made in my country. The advantages: it will pay your local craftsmen and you will have a product whose the lifetime is longer than fast shopping products.
French president Jacques Chirac once said: “Notre maison brûle mais nous regardons ailleurs” when speaking at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. This famous phrase explains in simple words how much we need to be aware of the urgency of climate change and above all act to fight for a better future. Each action as tiny as it is, has its importance in a global movement. So, I encourage everybody to find any material which will help them develop a good awareness of climate issues to make these tiny steps.
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