Calculating the carbon footprint of your vacation, one travel scenario at a time

Solutions

Weather-friendly travel planning calculator

Planning a vacation? A new tool lets you calculate the carbon cost of your trip by taking into account distance traveled, mode of transport and accommodation type.

Created by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, the travel and climate tool allows users to keep track of where they are, where they are going, how far they are traveling and for how long. The device tells users the carbon impact of each if they’re traveling by train, bus, gas-powered car, electric car or plane, and whether they’re staying in a tent, hostel or hotel.

Due to the high carbon emissions of airplanes, flying is the least climate-friendly way to reach a destination. Driving a car is often less carbon intensive than flying, especially if the car is electric. Trains are often the best choice, depending on the equipment, especially in Europe they are electric.

Jørgen Larsson, a sustainable consumption researcher at Chalmers and one of the researchers who helped create the tool, is one way he likes to travel sustainably is rail-bike tourism. This summer, he took a night train from his home in Gothenburg to northern Norway, cycling 30 to 40 miles each day on a folding bike to see the sights.

Although the tool is supported by European data, users can enter destinations from around the world, but Larson warns that calculations in places like the United States may be less accurate. He hopes to improve the device with information from the US and Canada.

Larson hopes that users of this device will consider why they want to travel. Is it because you want to do a certain activity or see a certain place? Or spending time with friends and family away from your usual surroundings?

“If that’s your deepest goal with your vacation, you’ll find plenty of climate-friendly options,” Larson said. “You don’t have to fly long distances to be with your friends and family. When going somewhere you can take public transport and fulfill that.

Science

The driving force behind climate stress

Only a few people in the UK experience climate stress, a new study suggests, but the situation could motivate people to take action on global warming.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Bath, surveyed around 1,300 adults in the UK in 2020 and again in 2022. About 80 percent of respondents said they were worried about climate change, but most did not elevate that concern to anxiety. Anxiety affects their mood and daily activities.

But researchers found that people who experienced climate stress were more likely to take steps in their lives to reduce their carbon footprint, such as waste and consumption.

Lorraine Whitmarsh, lead author of the study and an environmental psychologist at the University of Bath, said: “Maybe there is some level of climate stress that is a very adaptive response. Because it seems to encourage positive action on climate change.

The study found that climate stress was predicted by respondents’ media consumption rather than first-hand experience with a climate disaster. Whitmarsh suspects this is because media coverage tends to emphasize the dramatic effects of climate change.

The best way to communicate the severity of climate change is not only to discuss its dire consequences, but also to “show that there are things you can do to mitigate that risk, to increase your sense of efficacy to reduce the damage,” she said. Whitmarsh said. “So I think there’s an important role for the media in not just telling people about climate change, but telling them there are solutions.”

Culture

‘Prove the pain’

A new collection of essays, speeches, eulogies and poems tells a heartbreaking and sad story of loss to the natural world on Guam in the Pacific Ocean.

In his new book, writer and human rights lawyer Julian Aguon explores the climate and justice issues arising from Guam’s militarization while reflecting on his coming of age as a Chamorro who grew up in the American island nation. This month, “No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies,” Guam, 4,000 miles west of Hawaii, is a strategic location for the U.S. military and is home to two, soon to be three, bases and thousands of military personnel. Much military development is underway on the island, including a new artillery training range in the heart of an ecologically sensitive forest that supports many native species found nowhere else in the world, including the Mariana eight-spot butterfly.

Inside Climate News recently discussed the book with Agion. This discussion has been edited slightly for length and clarity.

Tell me about this new book and why you wanted to write it?

It’s a lot at once. It definitely breaks the rules when it happens. Essays scanned with old notes from my old journals from my youth, but also opening speeches, eulogies, and short images, ala Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street.” It’s just a whole bunch of guts, I think it’s a fun mess, but really, I thought I had some things to say, and they didn’t lend themselves to something that could be neatly categorized. So I’m lucky to have a publisher willing to destroy every party at once.

What does the title of your book “No Country for Eight Butterflies” mean?

The Mariana eight-spot butterfly is one of several endangered species directly threatened by the US military’s construction of a massive, multipurpose 59-acre machine range because they need this machine range. So, due to the demand of the question, they have started to destroy the limestone forest and these are the forests that have taken thousands of years in evolution. These are indeed specific areas, and they are the habitat of the eight-spot butterfly. And when I write “No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies,” I’m trying to point out the incredible beauty of a species that’s being crushed and destroyed by the American war machine. It is like witnessing this breaking.

How does being a native of Guam define and shape your perspective, and what should Native Americans know about this Pacific island?

The kind of military cover that has been deployed is not just here, it’s palpable, it can be felt in the air we breathe.

Americans think they are preparing for war. There is always a kind of “rallying the troops” rhetoric of going to war that we see at the congressional level and even in the executive branch. But if you’re part of the frontline community, there’s real-time warfare. As the US worries about China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific theater, what is happening on the ground is that they are expanding their military footprint. They are building the newest Marine Corps base built anywhere in this country since the 50’s. You can see military transport vehicles on land and in water. You see, the battle is now.

It’s like climate change. This is not a future crisis. It is a current crisis. It’s happening now. That’s what happens in America sometimes. This country likes to go to war, but it likes to make the suffering useless. The suffering is reaching the ground in remote communities.

Science

Less, slower and less effective

Warmer temperatures can result in smaller body sizes for insects. A new study of a common butterfly species shows that smaller individuals carry less pollen, which can be a problem for pollinator-based food crops.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia raised cabbage white butterflies in the laboratory and found that they hatched in warmer climates less than those in colder temperatures. They also found that smaller butterflies with smaller wings couldn’t fly as far or as fast as larger butterflies.

The researchers then looked at cabbage whites in the wild and found that individuals, similar to the smaller, warmer butterflies, carried less pollen than larger individuals.

Pollinators such as butterflies play an important role in spreading pollen to 35 percent of the world’s agricultural crops. The researchers argue that warming due to climate change will make pollinators smaller, slower and less efficient at transporting pollen.

“There’s a small risk that plants won’t be able to get enough pollen to make all their fruit,” said study co-author Michelle Teng, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. But we still don’t know for sure if that’s the case. She said that more research is needed to understand whether this phenomenon causes problems in agriculture.