Traveling responsibly has many aspects - cultural sensitivity as well as environmental impacts.
Local travel
Daily local travel choices affect not only the environment, but your health, peace of mind, and finances:
- Minimize car use, or car pool if you do need to go by car.
- Walk and cycle - to think people pay to keep fit, when this way you actually save money!
Environmental impact
On long journeys, consider taking a long time in a place, rather than just flying there for a few days.
Travel mode - fly, train, bus ship, bike...
Flying has a big impact, but alternatives such as travel by ship, bus and train over are often extremely inconvenient and actually more expensive. So what to do?
- Does carbon offset actually work? Which are the best offset schemes, actually make a difference?
- Considering how much can be saved by buying plane tickets wisely and well in advance (sometimes 80% or even more)[1] some of those savings could be used to buy a large amount of offsets - to more than offset your carbon impact.
Notes
- ↑ Especially buying 2 or 3 months or more in advance, doing plenty of comparison shopping and being flexible about dates. Regarding being flexible about dates, one interesting option is SkyScanner, where the date input includes a "whole month" option (which sometimes works but not always). If you find a great price through a site such as this, just be sure to use the savings responsibly - rather than traveling more, consider using some of your savings on carbon offsets, or supporting renewable energy research or another great environmental cause.