Best Tools for Low-Impact Travel
In 2010 this was a list of apps for calculating your carbon footprint. The calculators have got better and the honest summary is that four decisions account for most of the impact, and the rest is rounding.
Flying is the whole ballgame. One long-haul return can outweigh everything else you do in a year of careful choices. That gives three levers worth pulling, in order:
- Fewer, longer trips instead of several short ones. The take-off and landing are the fuel-hungry parts, so two weeks in one place beats four long weekends by a wide margin.
- Take the train where the geography allows it. In Europe this is genuinely competitive door to door under about five hours, and the emissions difference is roughly an order of magnitude.
- Fly economy and direct. A business seat takes several times the floor space and therefore several times the fuel per passenger, and a connection adds another take-off.
Then the ground game, which is where a traveller actually has control: stay somewhere local and family-run rather than a chain, eat what is grown nearby, and use the buses and trains that residents use. These matter less for carbon than the flight and more for whether the money you spend stays where you spent it.
On gear, the low-impact choice is nearly always the one you already own. Manufacturing dominates the footprint of almost every piece of kit, so repairing a ten-year-old pack beats buying a recycled-fabric new one. Most of the good brands now run repair services precisely because this is true.
A word on offsets, which this post originally recommended without caveat. The evidence on cheap forestry offsets has not been kind: many sold reductions that would have happened anyway. If you buy them, treat them as a donation rather than a cancellation, and do not let them change which flight you book.