CUT DOWN ON FLIGHTS.

If you fly, it’s the biggest slice of your personal climate pollution.

Let’s try to cut down on flights. Here’s how.

Flying needs to decline, because flying today is at odds with the massive reductions in emissions we need to make to avoid blowing all of humanity’s remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C by July 2029 (ACK!).

A great place to start is to join the Flight Free Campaign, which started in Sweden. Some chapters, like the UK and US, offer the chance to pledge to go flight-free for a year, to make a significant personal change and work for broader system change. (If work or family commitments mean you can’t go flight-free, you can also pledge to be flight-free for holidays.) Also check out the Stay Grounded campaign.

Read on for how to get started or ramp up staying grounded in 4 categories:
1. Personal flying
2. Work flying
3. Collective action
4. Policy and industry action

1. Personal flying

The majority of flying (about 80% in Sweden, and 70% in the US) is for personal, not business, trips.

Most important: Focus on building community where you are. And consider carefully how far away you live from loved ones, because long travel distances mean more carbon.

Identify which flights you don’t need; cut those first. A recent study of frequent flyers found the travelers themselves rated only 58 percent of their trips “important” or “very important.”

If you can’t stop flying, choose a way to limit your flights: by frequency (e.g., max 1 per year), distance (e.g., no flights within your country or a certain distance), or purpose (e.g., to see loved ones).

For holidays, explore destinations closer to home. This is part of an important shift in culture, where what constitutes “the good life” is not defined by “what you consume” (travel experiences), or an identity derived from your travel consumption, but instead towards living one’s values. Local holidays can be restorative and adventurous, as our study on Sweden’s flight-free movement showed.

Check out local and regional magazines and websites for ideas for biking- or transit-distance hikes, cafes, and excursions. Look for groups that organize local trips, who run cabins and affordable hostels in your area. Many may be accessible with public transport.

TrainBikeTouring has some beautiful inspiration.

Here are 100 fabulous and climate-smart trips within Europe.

2. Work flying

Start conversations about flying at work, and find at least one person who wants to work towards your organization flying less. Project Drawdown includes telepresence as a climate solution.

Get your organization to use behavioral science to support flying less, following guidance from World Resources Institute to:

(1) Make virtual easy;

(2) Use positive social norms and pledges;

(3) Encourage senior staff to lead new norms by convening explicit travel-reduction conversations; and

(4) Formalize institutional policies and procedures, like requiring a business justification for flights over a certain distance, incentivizing train travel for regional trips, or structuring budgets to and providing incentives for the use of virtual collaboration tools.

Ready to dive in? FlyingLessResourcesGuide.info is a one-stop shop for everything from practical guides to hosting low-carbon conferences, to getting your organization or industry to fly less, to how to push for funders and incentives to support flying less.

Join campaigns and communities like FlyingLess.org, which has fabulous resources and stories for academics flying less.

Here’s 4 minutes of me talking about how our department is going about flying less, and here’s a whole podcast on Flying Less!

Make institutional guidance like the Tyndall Centre decision tree to prioritize flights, and start conversations about equity. (Flying is usually distributed very unequally within organizations; their guidelines prioritize flights for younger and less advantaged scholars.)

Get inspired by others who are already leading the way- like these universities who have implemented or are planning measures to reduce flying.

3. Collective action

Talk about flying less! Many people find this a touchy topic. Maja Rosén of “We Stay On the Ground” has written a warm, smart, empathetic guide to connecting over real conversations. Tips on where and how to have these conversations, and a super-helpful Q&A with arguments and strategies for responding to claims like “We need to keep flying to support tourism” or “Flying increases our understanding of the world.” Watch Maja in this 5-minute interview; she’s brilliant. (For the hardcore, here’s the full guide).

Support campaigns to make flying (and frequent flyers) pay their fair share, like A Free Ride. They advocate a frequent flyer levy, where everyone gets one tax-free return flight per year. Taxes increase for each subsequent flight after the first, and are used to support alternatives to flying.

4. If you’re a politician or airline industry executive who wants to keep flying alive:

Get cracking on the sweeping investments, regulatory changes, and tech breakthroughs you need to do now and over the coming decades to make flying Paris Agreement-compatible in the future. You can start with this ICCT report and the action checklist (Table 1) from a recent study.

P.S. You might be surprised that we won’t focus on reducing consumption of things like plastics, clothing, or recycling. That’s because we focus on what reduces your personal climate pollution most as a high emitter, and those categories are dwarfed by other sources for high-emitting individuals, even if their global impact can be big (and is best tackled with regulation and production standards).