Article content continued

While she agrees that reducing air travel can significantly reduce an individual’s carbon emissions, it’s not an option for everyone — like those who travel to visit loved ones, or who can’t afford to take extended trips or spend significantly more on transportation. She said she knows people who can’t reduce their flights, but take other measures to reduce their carbon footprint, like buying local produce and limiting or completely eliminating their car use.

“Depending on your socio-economic status, you have different options,” Whitney said. “Is it right for you to provide blanket requests of people to behave in a certain way? Ideally, we could do these things. Morally, can you really ask everybody to make the same tradeoff?”

Generally, air travel drastically dwarfs the carbon emissions resulting from any other activity in someone's life

Catherine Abreu, executive director at Climate Action Network Canada, said that while most of the actions needed to fight climate change should happen at the organization-level, reducing your flying time is one of the most significant steps an individual can take to reduce their annual carbon emissions.

“Generally, air travel drastically dwarfs the carbon emissions resulting from any other activity in someone’s life,” Abreu said. She also mentioned that while a lot of the conversation is centred around commercial flights, a significant portion of emissions come from cargo planes, which transport goods over long distances.

And the movement is definitely making waves. According to Bloomberg, Sweden had its weakest year in terms of airplane passenger growth in the last decade, and a WWF survey found that 23 per cent of Swedes had reduced their air travel due to climate change concerns in 2018.

Internationally, a survey of 6,000 people from the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, and France commissioned by the Swedish bank UBS found that about one-fifth of respondents have reduced the amount of flights they take in a year. The bank concludes that the change will reduce the total growth numbers of some major airlines, and possibly limit the amount of new planes ordered by those companies in the future.