Long Distance Trips Deserve Greater Attention (A Graphical Summary)

Folks who care deeply about reducing the environmental impact of travel should have new research from Jillian Anable, Zia Wadud, and Adeel Muhammad on their radar.

Punchline: long distance trips deserve greater attention in our carbon reduction efforts.

My graphical summary of their work:

The team analyzed all trips across an entire year for residents of England. Lesson 1: While short trips are common over the year, they contribute a small share of annual miles and emissions.

Lesson 2: Long trips—which are extremely rare—contribute disproportionately to mileage and emissions.

Here's a full look at total annual short and long distance travel in the same graphs. Long trips are so rare they barely show up on the Trip graph, but dominate Miles and CO2.

To help policymakers consider the share of trips, miles and CO2 when developing carbon reduction strategies, the team created an emission reduction sensitivity calculation (larger numbers are better). To be clear: This shouldn't be the only consideration in crafting policy.

The team compared several (extraordinarily ambitious) policies, two of which I highlight here:

Key takeaway: Long trips deserve greater attention.

While tackling emissions from air travel poses unique opportunities, there are also challenges. Miles flown continue to increase and flying remains highly unequal: ~20% of fliers in the UK take ? of all flights.

The full article is available open access in Nature Energy.

For those looking for more detail: Here's the full table of policy levers the authors compared. Any of them would be an immense challenge to implement, but knowing the emission reduction sensitivity can help us make wise decisions.