Sustainable habits of digital nomads
Last year I was travelling the world with digital nomads. It was a mindblowing experience for sure, but that’s the story of another blog post. In this one, we’ll get to know their attitudes and habits towards sustainability and measure the impact of the community.
My 3 key learnings from the research:
- Most of the digital nomads have no idea about their carbon footprint.
- Most say they love nature and care about the environment, but they don’t really want to sacrifice their comfort to improve or save it.
- Small changes can add up if they become a group norm.
I set out to measure the most I could, so I created a detailed survey to learn more about nomad’s relationship to the environment and their carbon footprint. The research is ongoing, so if you are a digital nomad & have 10 minutes to fill it out, you still can and I will highly appreciate your effort!
The number of Americans and Hungarians are significantly higher, that’s surely the bias of my personal network.
Even though 91% consider themselves to be nature lovers, all 100% like outdoor activities and 42% said that they used a CO2 calculator before, they know surprisingly little about their carbon footprint.
When they realized they were unaware of this number, I asked them to play a guessing game. Could they estimate their own personal footprint? I gave them a little help: scaled answer options and hints like India’s per capita footprint (1,800 kg) and the annual sustainable average for a person if every human were to contribute equally (2,300 kg).
43% of participants estimated that their footprint is under 16,000 kg, most of them (27.3%) hoping to be on the lower end of the scale. Looking at this, most travellers don’t seem to know that they have much higher emissions than non-travellers.
Given that only 5% of the world’s population ever travelled on a plane, I assume that frequent flyers have a higher footprint than the personal average of their country. Why? Because a flight that crosses the Atlantic emits about 1,000 kg of CO2, so those who travel frequently increase their emissions big time. Only a few people got this, they estimated their footprint to be larger than their country average. I also want to note that a nomad’s footprint is probably significantly higher even than these guesses because they fly much more than the average person in their country.
Besides this research, I also hosted workshops on the topic and I kept asking people about their carbon footprint. What I realized is that the majority don’t even know the unit we use (is it tonnes or kilograms?) and no idea about the scale either (is it dozens or hundreds?).
From the responders so far, very few spend more than 3 months in a location, most of them only spend a few weeks to a month in the same place. 63% visited more than 30 countries already. This means they take at least 6 flights per year.
According to responders, governments and individuals are the ones who should take care of nature. The main polluters, corporations, only got the 3rd place.
The survey collected details about their commuting and eating habits. The results show that nomads do walk a lot, I didn’t manage to find anyone who uses a van, and they generally prefer public transport above cars, scooters, or bicycles.
I am most curious about how likely they are willing to change their behaviour.
The answers show that the majority of nomads would not compromise the comfort of flights to more sustainable means of travel. About 10% doesn’t care at all about saving energy, but it shows that they are open to deal with less than ideal temperatures.
In order to get a general idea of their sustainability efforts, there was a free text field where they could tell us anything.
Plastic — the flagship topic for sustainability
There was a lot of education these past years about plastic and seemingly it reached many people. Plastic is a problem that’s easier to connect to than CO2 because it’s visible. Many of the nomads remember the clean beaches of Bali and see how they changed. That’s also something that gathers in the garbage bin in huge amounts, so it’s very easy to have tangible results. Many talk about locally sourced food and eating no meat. What they don’t know is that the CO2 emission of producing a plastic bag is between 5 g (lightweight “sandwich bag” and 50 g (heavyweight reusable variety) while a paper bag is between 12 g (lightweight, recycled one) to 100 g (heavyweight, a virgin paper that you get in fashion shops) based on the book How bad are the bananas. The manufacturing of those trendy tote bags has the highest emission is about 271 kg (598.6 pounds).
The story is similar when we think of bottles. The creation of a plastic bottle has lower emission than glass not to mention metal. So if you keep losing your bags and bottles and buying new ones it doesn’t make you more sustainable. You have to reuse these items thousands of times in order to make them more sustainable. Of course, there are other aspects of sustainability than CO2 emissions and while the paper will disappear from the side of the streets eventually, your plastic bag will be found in the stomach of a whale long after that whale has decomposed. The problem is that our intuitive solutions aren’t necessarily the best for the environment.
I’m sustainable, I’m vegan
Another common misunderstanding is that going vegan will make you sustainable. Following several digital nomad groups, I often see this coming up as an answer when the topic is the emission reduction of flights.
It is true that going vegan will cut the CO2 emission of your food consumption into half or even maybe a third, but it won’t allow you to fly much. Based on this Harward study, a vegan diet has an emission of 809 kg per person per year, followed closely by the vegetarian diet with 957 kg per person per year. However, a far higher greenhouse gas emission of 2,880 kg per person per year was calculated from the meat-based diet. If you want to get close to the annual personal sustainable carbon footprint which is 2,300–3,000 kg you won’t be able to eat meat regularly.
But you can’t make up for your love of travelling by simply not eating meat. Just one long-distance flight on an average airline will have a larger impact than your yearly food consumption, whichever diet you follow.
Knowledge makes an impact
You can see that our personal efforts are really just a drop in the sea. The climate impact of putting the whole world in quarantine only pushed Earth Overshoot Day from July 29 in 2019 to August 22 in 2020. There was a radical cut in carbon footprint during March and April but it quickly picked up as the factories turned back on and started to make up for the lost months of production.
So why do I bother with measuring individual impact?
Because knowledge shapes our behaviour, our behaviour shapes our consumer habits, and our consumer habits shape how businesses operate and governments regulate. Simply saying, we won’t be able to solve the biggest challenge of the 21st century if we don’t understand it.
Veganism doesn’t help the emission of our flights. But you might have seen that more and more restaurants are offering vegan options because the margin on a pumpkin soup can be significantly higher than the margin on a meat soup. Trends are shaping our world and we have to be conscious of what trends we jump on.
The bright side of being a nomad
The impact of digital nomads is not only negative & measured in higher CO2 emissions. There are a lot more factors but they are much harder to measure.
Travelling contributes to our wellbeing, it’s part of our education. Our experience of working remotely helps many of us drive digital transformation in our companies. Intercultural experience and skills help us build bridges between any type of stakeholders easily & peacefully. Most of us not only have decent work but we even create decent jobs that support personal freedom.
Whether we are part of the problem or part of the solution is a personal decision that I wrote about here.
We all see many examples of nomads who only take advantage of developing countries and their affordable prices but I’m hopeful this isn’t and won’t be the norm. Most nomads do realize that they are super privileged and we can find many who are passionate about giving back to the societies they live in. The quickly growing organization called Nomads Giving Back is working exactly on this.
It is hard to find the right measurements for these areas and nothing is black or white here, but we can always choose to put in the effort for a better future without compromising too much of our present happiness.
