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Outside In | Living with flight shame: Some air travel is essential even amid a climate change crisis
- That’s not to say zero net carbon emission targets are not important. Where flights are unavoidable, as for many international meetings, we should go beyond carbon offsetting to tackle some hard questions, such as how many meetings are truly necessary, and where to meet for the lightest carbon footprint
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The chill breath of flygskam – Swedish for flight shame – swept into the Apec Business Advisory Council meetings earlier this month when Malaysia, the chair for this year, tabled proposals for all of us to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2025.
Since an estimated 79 per cent of the carbon footprint of our quarterly meetings is generated by the flights we take to and from the meetings, whether we get to net zero will depend crucially on managing our flights.
And therein lies a dilemma. As Birgitta Frejhagen, a fan of Greta Thunberg and founder of “Gretas Gamlingar” (Greta’s Oldies), put it: “There is a shame of flying, but sometimes you have to fly.”
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Not just in the Apec Business Advisory Council, but in countless boardrooms across the world, the same questions are surely being asked: how important is it to stop flying? When is it really essential that we fly? And if we do, how do we minimise or mitigate the emissions we generate?
Britain’s Climate Commission in its “Behaviour Change, Public Engagement and Net Zero” report is clear: “Flying is a uniquely high-impact activity.”
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