Cover Story
Flight or fright?
by Matt Nippert
Calls to curb international travel could have dire consequences for our second-largest foreign-exchange earner.
Tony Wheeler and Mark Ellingham can take a lot of credit for the influx of nearly two and a half million tourists who touched down at New Zealand airports last year. Local editions of the travel books they founded, respectively the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide, are routinely among their best sellers.
But the men behind the tourist bibles have now decided that the industry they helped create has grown too big for their consciences. At a press conference last year, they jointly called for curbs on travel that could have dire consequences for our second-largest foreign-exchange earner.
Their message? “Fly less and stay longer.”
The reason? Concern that carbon emissions from aircraft contribute to global warming. As Ellingham told the Observer: “Being in the travel business, I’ve taken more than the average number of flights, and was used to casually flying off to Naples for the weekend.”
But after the furore set off by last year’s Stern Review, which flagged aviation as a fast-growing and especially potent contributor to climate change, Ellingham decided to fly less often. Moreover, he said he was planning to “take at least part of my holidays in places that you can drive to or take a train”.
And if his stand should damage sales of his books? His response served as an ominous warning for New Zealand tourism: “If that happens, so be it.”
A cautious Tourism Minister Damien O’Connor says, “Potentially, this could affect the way that we are seen as a long-haul destination.”
Growing concern over “air miles” is already being exploited by our northern hemisphere competitors. A full-page advertisement in a January edition of popular British magazine Radio Times promoted crossing the North Sea as an alternative to flying to the South Pacific.
“Nearer than New Zealand. Air as clear as the Andes. Norway awaits,” the pitch read. A Daily Telegraph columnist wrote that “flying is the new veal”.
Airlines operating here say they’re not feeling the pinch. Yet. “We’re not noticing any impact at all, so far, in terms of actual flowing through to business,” says Air New Zealand’s Ed Sims. “But there’s certainly no question that it’s uppermost in people’s minds.”
Sims, who heads Air New Zealand International, says enquiries to our national carrier’s European call centres have been running, if not hot, at least much warmer. “A lot of passengers, especially in the UK, are ringing the contact centre asking about our emissions, the age of our fleet and how conscious we are of the impact we’re having on the environment.”
Jill Rawnsley, director of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, which brings writers here from around the world, confirms that they’ve found it much harder this year to get people to travel. One writer turned down the invitation specifically because of concern over carbon emissions.
Sims stresses that air travel is far from inefficient (“four-wheel-drives are about four times less efficient than modern aircraft”). But the fact remains that jets consume eight times the fuel that trains do travelling the same distance.
The Stern Review noted that air travel contributes only 1.6 percent of total carbon emissions, but a tripling of jet traffic over the next four decades will offset any fuel efficiencies and see this rise to 2.5 percent of emissions.
Both O’Connor and Sims stress that airlines contribute only a small proportion to climate change, but Sir Nicholas Stern, former head of the World Bank, wrote that aviation’s harmful effects are greater than they first appear.
“The impact of aviation on climate change is greater than these figures suggest because of other gases released by aircraft and their effects at high altitude. For example, water vapour emitted at high altitude often triggers the formation of condensation trails, which tend to warm the Earth’s surface.”
Because of this effect, and others, aviation emissions have more than twice the warming effect of emissions from other sectors and will account for a full five percent of human-induced climate change by 2050.
Air New Zealand’s response to worried European callers, says Sims, is to tell them about the airline’s drive for fuel and emission efficiency. The Boeing 777 was introduced recently, and orders have been placed for a number of next-generation 787-9s.
Sims says the 787-9 “is by far the most fuel-efficient aircraft available in the commercial market, and by the time of that introduction we’re looking at 40-50 percent reduced emissions and fuel burn over that of current aircraft”.
Hugh Somerville, former environmental manager at British Airways, supports this view. “The first step is always fuel efficiency,” he told the Journal of Sustainable Tourism last year. “Fundamentally, that step is driven by economics as well as ethical concerns.”
Another strategy Sims looked at, and discounted, was a British Airways initiative that allows passengers to pay a “carbon-offset” fee with their ticket price – a step independently taken by rock groups such as Coldplay and the Rolling Stones to minimise the effects of their globe-hopping tours. This voluntary charge adds $160 to the price of a return flight between Auckland and London.
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