I’ve been interested in and concerned about climate change and other environmental issues for a long time now.
Despite this, the environmental impact of flying was not something I had ever thought about until the last few years.
My brother stopped flying a few years ago and that opened my eyes to the damage I was doing and also to the opportunities that being flight free can create for you travel-wise.
My interest in climate change led me to doing a masters in environmental policy and towards the end of the year I had to choose a dissertation topic. I ended up writing about the future of air travel sustainability in the UK.
There seemed to be so little happening to address the massive inequality and rising emissions from air travel.
Writing this was really interesting and gave me some great insight into air travel policy and things like slow travel.
It also made it very clear to me that air travel has no chance of being sustainable in the near future.
I realised that flying less or ideally not at all is the best and only option to reduce my air travel emissions right now.
I’ve taken the Flight Free 2022 pledge as I believe that taking this personal responsibility for the climate is important, and collective individual actions are a crucial way of working towards major government and system change.
Also, I’ve realised that all of my favourite holidays and travel don’t involve flying anyway, so it just makes a lot of sense to be flight free.
