Sparking Carbon Removal in Travel

There’s little debate anymore about the urgency for all people to take action on climate change.

As people who work in travel, we can do our part to help restore our climate by acting together to reduce new carbon emissions from travel and cleaning up the trillions of tons of legacy emissions already stored in our atmosphere. 

There’s scientific consensus that we need fast action to scale up our capacity to remove carbon dioxide with the help of technology. Most of the people I interact with in travel - I come from the adventure travel category - are well aware that our Earth’s natural systems for absorbing carbon such as soil, ocean, trees, are in vital need of protection and restoration. What’s new, however, is the role of carbon removal technology and the necessity of its scale-up to support our natural systems. 

When Tourism Cares offered me a guest blog spot I leapt at the chance to share what I’ve learned about climate action and pose a few questions and ideas to this community for how we might band together to make a difference. 

What I’ve Learned

• Scientists estimate we need to remove over 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year by 2050. 

• If all human carbon dioxide emissions were to stop today, some experts calculate it would take approximately 900 years for natural systems alone to handle the carbon emissions stored in our atmosphere

• All future scenarios for keeping temperature increase on Earth below 1.5 degrees, include carbon removal. Among the carbon removal options, carbon removal technologies which scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are recognized for their ability to support natural systems and speed up the rate at which we reduce carbon dioxide concentration. An example of this is direct air capture carbon removal. 

• People have opportunity to invest in and support the scale-up of carbon removal technologies such as direct air capture now, in order to have the capacity for them to provide gigaton scale removal us in the next thirty years (e.g. by 2050)

The recognition of those facts got me thinking about the role and the opportunity for tourism.

Travel contributes eight percent of global emissions when we consider the flights, accommodation, meals, ground transport and shopping. Travelers themselves are devoted appreciators of all the world has to offer, and with literally billions of them (pre-covid) generating ten percent of global GDP, it seems we could have the potential to exert some influence. What if travel - the travelers and the businesses who serve them - united to help scale up carbon removal tech alongside our support for rewilding, forest and marine conservation projects? Could we not be part of the grand gigaton scale solution the world needs?

This is the spirit that drove me to co-found Tomorrow’s Air with Nim de Swardt.

Incubated by the Adventure Travel Trade Association, Tomorrow’s Air provides travelers and travel companies a way to support carbon removal via direct air capture with permanent storage along with creative inspiration and education to mobilize a global collective. 

And now, my questions for the Tourism Cares community, based on what I’ve learned since July 21, 2020, when Tomorrow’s Air went live with full functionality. First, we observe that individual travelers, once they understand the facts, are open to signing up and chipping in. They  appreciate the access we provide to a curated list of sustainable travel benefits, and are happy to share their involvement with the effort. Small businesses and larger ones both grapple with a similar need to align their commitment to carbon removal with existing (or non-existing) climate action initiatives already in place in their business. Some prefer to incorporate carbon removal into their existing carbon offsetting strategy and make a one-time purchase, others like the idea of engaging their staff through individual subscriptions which empower their teams to feel directly connected to the effort. A couple are organizing their budgets to direct a percentage of bookings revenues to Tomorrow’s Air as a way to chip in. 

This is brings me to a question, 

• What holds you back from supporting carbon removal technology? 

  • Is it your confidence in your understanding of the issue and ability to make a smart decision that keeps you from making a move? 

  • Is it the structure internally of your business that makes allocating funding a challenge? For example, I know that some businesses, particularly travel advisory businesses struggle to find ways to incorporate something like this in their commission-based model. 

  • Do you disagree with the science?

Christina Beckman

I want to keep the benefits of travel - the revenues for local livelihoods, the funding for conservation, not to mention the pure exhilaration and fun of meeting new people and experiencing new places - and I want to address this important negative consequence of how we’ve typically traveled. At this point I realize that we need to do many things at once: we need to reduce our emissions, we need to transform how we deliver travel experiences, and we also need to help clean up the legacy emissions stored in our atmosphere. 

Learn more about carbon removal in travel at Tomorrowair.com, follow us on social, and feel free to share your comments and ideas with me: christina@tomorrowsair.com.