Good news: traveling is back! The bad news: our travel leaves a trail of greenhouse gas footprints. Fortunately, you can lighten your travel impacts in three simple steps: reduce, calculate, offset.
Reduce what you can
- Avoid travel through video conferencing.
- Choose trains over planes.
- Choose a carrier that uses fuel-efficient planes or vehicles.
- Use ride-sharing
- Stay in LEED-certified hotels.
- Use vendors that monitor and mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions.
Calculate what you can't reduce
- In the following boxes, enter the estimated number or your flights, car miles, rail trips and hotel stays per year.
- The subtotal emissions for each category, along with TOTAL Tco2/e*, will be automatically calculated.
Ready to do your calculations? Use these handy tools:
Offset Your calculated total footprint
You can reduce your own climate impact by supporting one of many emissions reduction programs. While EDF cannot endorse or recommend any particular calculator, reduction project or provider, here are three you could explore:
Thank you for doing your part!
Curious about transforming aviation to help the climate?
*Explanation of Carbon Footprint Terms: The carbon dioxide equivalence (tCO2e) with a 100-year time horizon (CO2e-100) is used for emissions estimates when non-CO2 pollutants are included in addition to CO2. For shorthand purposes we use the abbreviation CO2e. Non-CO2 emissions for air travel are mostly nitrogen oxide emissions from aircraft flying over 9,000 meters. The emissions factors employed for air travel are provided by our source using an average Radiative Forcing Index of approximately 2.7. Non-CO2 emissions for hotel stays include N2O and CH4. We note that the inclusion of non-CO2 emissions undervalues their potency in the near-term, and that alternatively using a GWP-20/CO2e-20 would undervalue CO2’s potency in the long-term. Given that the majority of emissions reported here are CO2, a 100-year time horizon is reasonable for this assessment.