Long haul air travel is good for the environment?
29. Oct, 2008
2 Comments
Cape town – We’ve all heard about the environmental costs of air travel, with longer trips meaning more carbon output. But some argue that flying long haul to developing countries actually helps more than harms.
Over at the Sustainable Options blog, Gerhard Buttner raises the concern about what would happen if laws passed in wealthy countries (Europe, North America) make air travel prohibitively expensive in order to slash the carbon emissions from flying. The UK is close to such legislation now. At first glance, this seems like a sensible policy decision. However, while it may seem like a good thing to take a modern, efficient high-speed train from London to Berlin instead of flying, the unintended consequences for Africa would be a reduction in travel and tourism from our most reliable and biggest spending source markets.
In South Africa, with tourism such a large proportion of GDP and business travel key for nearly all sectors of the economy, the negative effects would be felt widely. Quoting UK-based Rainbow Tours,
“…if people were to stop visiting Africa because of a desire to cut down on flying, the effect on communities would be catastrophic. In many areas, tourism offers the only chance of employment and hope for the future.”
The argument continues that poverty and despair are not good for the environment. People aren’t concerned with saving trees or keeping waterways clean if they’re starving. They’ll take down forests to make charcoal to sell in order to feed their families, then farm the land intensively until the soil is depleted in a few years – as most people would if that’s the difference between life and death. In short, the environmental effects of increased poverty may be worse than the relative benefits gained from reducing air travel.
However, given the overall smaller carbon footprints of developing countries, a counter argument says that economic development isn’t good for the environment either. If we bring an end to poverty by introducing a resource gobbling, high-consumption consumerist society in its place, we just accelerate the carbon output the planet has to absorb.
The former argument is nearly impossible to measure, and is so dependent on the particular country being visited, the reason for travel, length of stay and local spend generated from the trip that it’s hard to see how it could be implemented even if it were shown to be sound. The latter argument has compelling data behind it, but keeping developing countries in poverty as an intentional policy choice is ethically more bankrupt than intentionally increasing carbon emissions.
Difficult as this issue is to sort out, our industry leadership and national policy makers need to be engaged and participate in the debates. If we’re silent here in South Africa, the fate of our tourism industry could be determined by European policy makers who do good for Europe while Africa pays the price yet again.
Learn more at Planeta.com, and Green.Travel
About Blogger
KURT ACKERMANN writes, researches and consults on strategy, business models and brands for organisations adapting to globalisation and technological change. He is the proprietor of the Afrikatourism blog for responsible travel at afrikatourism.blogspot.com.
My name is Muzi Mohale a full-time travel blogger, your host at Travelwires.com responsible for all editorial on this blog. I blog about the travel and tourism industry in Africa. Apart from blogging about tourism, I also run 
I dont think I fully agree with you. I think this article should have been devided into 2 or 3 articles so that the argument could have been properly formed.
Hi SA Flights – thanks for your comment. The only argument I (thought I) made was that there seems to be a valid, counter-intuitive perspective on the environmental costs of long haul air travel to developing countries. With two seemingly sensible and contradictory perspectives on how to deal with a question of such importance to the SA economy (i.e., long haul flights), we need our leaders and policy makers to engage and work through the options carefully.