My lowish-carbon birding – flights

In the previous blog post I looked at my Birdtrack records – clearly birding records – to explore in more detail my carbon footprint from birding. But that was all about my UK birding. Here I’m looking at another aspect of my carbon emissions – my air travel.  And I can examine my air travel through my lifetime – not all of which, by any means, as you will see, was for birding.  In fact, it would be quite difficult to say that any of it was for birding, although I saw birds on all of these trips. Rather than get into that, it makes sense to look at the lot of them.

So, these are two, I hope interesting ways, of looking at my foreign air travel for any reason at all, through my lifetime.  First, I look at which countries I have ever visited, and I group them (in a rather birding way), by when I first added them to my country list. I didn’t have a country list until a few minutes ago, but now I do and here it is:

1-9 years          none

11-19 years      France

20-29 years      Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden

30-39 years      USA, Kenya, Ghana

40-49 years       Belarus, Latvia, Morocco, Switzerland

50-59 years       Australia, Austria, India, Slovakia, Israel

60+ so far          Iceland, Poland

Explanation: these are the countries I have visited, ordered by the first visit to that country and my age at that time. I have excluded China and Czechia as I touched down in them on a plane and then left after changing planes. Those countries in Green were reached by means other than flight (ferry, train or car from an adjacent country), those in Red were reached by air (but remember, these are first visits).

So, I have a country list of 25 countries – what’s yours? And my first visits to those countries tended to be by ferry, rail and car – partly because I was young and poor, and partly because I didn’t go very far. A string of countries, green countries, in my 20s were due to the 1978 Cambridge Norwegian expedition travelling, most of us, in a car to Norway via a ferry to Zeebrugge and a drive through Europe to get to the Hardangervidda Plateau (to ring Purple Sandpipers and Dotterel).  You’ll notice a green Poland most recently, a very pleasant two-day rail journey to Warsaw (and back) via Berlin because I had the time (and money) and inclination to do it that way.

Let’s just look at the Red countries.  It’s difficult to study Little Brown Bats if you don’t go to them, and that’s why I visited Canada. My first visit to the USA was in connection with Roseate Tern conservation at a time before email (can you even imagine it?) and Roseate Terns took me to Ghana for work too.  Kenya and Australia were both holidays – no doubt about that. Kenya was a pre-kids adventure because we knew we probably wouldn’t get the chance for years ahead, and Australia was a with-kids adventure which was partly to catch up with emigrated friends of ours but also close friends of our children – but the wildlife was brilliant. Austria, Belarus, India, Latvia, Morocco, Slovakia, Switzerland were all whilst working for RSPB, during which time, you can believe it or not, I was very loath to fly, and turned down many opportunities, but sometimes the job demanded it, and then one makes the most of it, so I have had great birding experiences with BirdLife International colleagues in Europe, Africa and Asia. Iceland, I think, counts as ‘work’ as I visited Iceland to hand in a petition to the Icelandic Prime Minister.  Israel was as part of a team doing a birdwatch to raise money for bird conservation. It was a great trip with great companions, meeting birders and conservationists from across the world and seeing a bunch of new birds (see here) but I slightly regret going.  I had turned down two previous invitations but I weakened – most people weaken sometimes.

By the way, my first flight was at the age of 24, I reckon, and was to Bonn, the capital of a place called West Germany, to give a talk about my ongoing Ph.D. research at a European Bat Conference.  When was your first flight – at what age?

My father (1920-1996) never flew, and my mother (1926-  ) has only flown once, in her 70s, to Spain, on a family holiday with us.

Here’s a second way of looking at my foreign travel – how much time have I spent in each of those 24 countries which I have visited? Here they are ranked in order and with the CO2-equivalent emissions from return flights calculated:

 

France           192 days  2 flights                    .8

USA                148 days  5 flights                  9.7

Spain             136 days   6 flights                  2.7

Portugal         37 days    3 flights                 3.3

Norway          25 days    0 flights

Canada          22 days     1 flight                   1.6

Kenya            21 days      1 flight                   2.2

Australia       21 days      1 flight                   4.8

Ghana           20 days      3 flights                 1.7

Ireland          16 days      2 flights                  .2

Poland          12 days       0 flights

Germany      11 days       1 flight                  .2

Belgium        10 days       0 flights

Morocco        10 days       2 flights              1.6

Netherlands  9 days        0 flights

Iceland            7 days       1 flight                  .7

India               7 days         1 flight               2.2

Slovakia          6 days         2 flights             1.0

Belarus           5 days         1 flight                 .7

Denmark       5 days          0 flights

Switzerland    4 days          2 flights            .7

Latvia              4 days           1 flight             .6

Sweden          3 days           0 flights

Austria           2 days           1 flight               .5

Israel              7 days            1 flight             1.2

Total            737 days                                    36tonnes Co2e

I’ve spent the equivalent of two years of my life abroad, out of the UK. The largest part of that was in France, and most of that time in France was studying European Bee-eaters in the Camargue but there are family holidays, and a French exchange visit at the age of c13 years, in that total too.  France has occupied lots of my life but I haven’t as you can see, spent much of it in French airports – ferries and Eurostar are wonderful alternatives.  The USA is the country where I have spent the second-largest chunk of time – three work trips and two very long holidays.  And then there is Spain – almost all holiday by any reckoning but quite a lot of train and ferry travel to get there and back.  My flights to Portugal have all been to the Azores, and on work.

36t CO2e is approximately the equivalent of 3 years of the average UK citizen’s total carbon emissions.  But those 36t have been spread over nearly 65 years of existence which means that to date, international air travel has probably made up less than 5% of my lifetime CO2e emissions. By my reckoning, 20t of those 36t were expended on work where, believe it or not, if I hadn’t copped those emissions then somebody else almost certainly would have done. But the other 15t, notably trips to Kenya, Australia, some of those USA visits and then a few flights to France, Spain and Ireland were definitely leisure.  What’s done is done, but I’ve never worked it out before…

I doubt I’ll fly abroad very often, if at all, in the rest of my life, but it’s difficult to know where one’s children might end up living…

Is that information interesting? Well, it interests me and now I’ve shown you mine, I’d be interested in you showing me yours. Don’t be shy! The first table is easy to work out, and quite fun to do – how many countries have you visited and at what age did you first set foot in each of them?  My prediction is that the younger you are, the earlier you went abroad and the more countries, for your age, you have visited (if we had a large enough sample of people to look at).

The second table is more time consuming but it doesn’t have to be perfectly correct to be interesting in general. I expect mine is slightly misremembered but it will generally be true. The CO2e can be found here Carbon offset flights – Flight Carbon Calculator – myclimate.org (but whether or not they are accurate I don’t know).

 

 

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