What we learnt offsetting air travel to COP26 for 197 world leaders

COP26, the next UN climate conference, starts on 1st November. In the days before the conference gets underway, world leaders and their entourages from all corners of the globe will make their way to the UK, and over to the conference venue in Glasgow.

As one of our COP activities, at Ecologi we decided to offset the world leader’s flight emissions, as well as planting two trees – one tree at one of our reforestation sites in Scotland, and one tree in our overseas sites – for every world leader representing a Party to the UNFCCC at COP26 – even the ones who didn’t bother to show up.

That’s 197 world leaders’ travel in total, totalling around 331 tonnes of carbon to be offset, and also 394 trees to be planted.

We chose to do this because, whilst all of us should be taking steps to reduce our emissions (including limiting or abstaining from air travel) our team – guided as ever by our wonderful Climate Committee – agreed that attending a key UN climate conference in person is one of the more compelling reasons to fly across the world.

As we’ve discussed before, offsetting is not a substitute for making cuts in emissions: not flying is always better than flying and then offsetting. However, given the importance of COP26 and the fact that we believe that, for this particular kind of event, attending in-person is better than being remote, we chose not to chastise world leaders for flying to Glasgow.

Instead, we chose to celebrate the idea of leaders coming together to negotiate and discuss climate change. We calculated what their emissions would be, assuming they travelled from the location of their country’s seat of government (a full breakdown of how we did our calculations is below), and we will be retiring carbon credits equivalent to that amount – in our usual mix of tonnes verified to a leading carbon standard (to see how we select our projects for offsetting, take a look on the blog). We hope that this gesture will mitigate some of the negative impact associated with the flights these world leaders have taken to get there.

As well as the offset, we thought the act of planting two trees apiece for all 197 Parties, with each nation’s name on it, into our virtual ‘COPSE26’ forest, would represent our feeling of goodwill about the COP finally taking place after a year’s delay.

Our gesture comes with a very simple message to world leaders: make it count.

The 331 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent produced by these world leaders’ travel to COP is, according to the EPA’s calculation, approximately the same as the emissions produced by burning 766 barrels of oil, or by consuming over 37,000 gallons of gasoline, or by charging a smartphone 40 million times.

According to this 2016 article in the journal Science, the 331 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions produced by sending these world leaders to COP will result in the loss of 993 square metres of Arctic sea ice.

As with every COP, there are already discussions taking place in the media about whether the event is or will be a success. Lots of these are centred around the fact that certain world leaders have ‘snubbed’ the event by not showing up in person. 

More pressing is the notion that concrete, effective climate agreements and commitments need to result from COP26 in order for there to be a realistic chance of limiting global surface warming to 1.5ºC by the end of the century, and perhaps even for limiting it to 2ºC warming.

This is why our message to the world leaders, in particular those representing countries of the Global North and countries with the highest historical and current emissions, is this:

Welcome to Glasgow.

We have offset your personal travel here (even if you didn’t show up) and we have also planted two trees for each of you, in your country’s name.

We have done this because we believe that running COP26 in person will lead to a better chance of the conference ending in an agreement that will heal our ecosystems, restore balance to our climate system, and support a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels.

It is our hope that you will listen to the billions of people worldwide who are calling for climate action. These people deserve and expect you to deliver real, impactful action in Glasgow in the coming days.

The following two weeks are your opportunity to step up. Show leadership. Take initiative. Cooperate. You already know what’s at stake – your own scientists have been warning you for years.

It now falls to you to carry out your end of the bargain. 

Make it count.

Last year, COP26 was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic whilst other global summits simply went online. Telepresence (a fancy word for tuning in remotely) is a recognised climate solution since it dramatically reduces (though does not totally eliminate) carbon emissions associated with running the event.

But undertaking an international climate summit online would have its challenges. Aside from the now-routine issues with accidental muting and difficulties connecting, there are more substantial ways that telepresence cannot match being there in person, when complex, sensitive issues are at hand.

As Leo Hickman, Editor of CarbonBrief, pointed out during the Cabot Institute’s recent Annual Lecture, it can be much easier for representatives of powerful countries in the Global North to ignore or shut out the voices of their counterparts from the Global South – when ignoring them can plausibly be blamed on a poor wifi connection.

The negotiations that take place at COPs are incredibly complex, involving thousands of people, and relying on quick, reliable, person-to-person communication to produce effective outcomes. In 2011, the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, which committed the Parties to a new legally-binding treaty to be defined in 2015, was agreed after a marathon 60-hour negotiation. That new accord that the Parties had agreed to be bound by in 2015 became the Paris Agreement. Producing similar outcomes remotely may be difficult or even impossible.

We already know that the countries of the Global North are responsible for the vast majority of historical emissions, and we also know that the countries of the Global South are more at risk from the impacts of climate change that they are not responsible for having caused. In addition, key pledges of funding by the Global North to the Global South have not yet materialised, and this funding is unlikely to be made available until 2023.

There are a huge number of ways in which rich countries are treated differently on the international stage, but the ways in which the influence of countries from the Global South is suppressed at events such as COP26 goes beyond this. 

The COP has become prohibitively inaccessible for many delegates from the Global South. Two of the key reasons for this are vaccine inequity (since many countries are simply blocked from attending due to UK travel restrictions) and cost (since accommodation in Glasgow for two weeks during COP could set you back well over £5,000). In addition to travel bans, vaccine inequity means delegates from some countries in the Global South may be forced to risk their own health if they make the journey to COP. Delegates from many countries are also forced to reconcile the fact that journeying to COP in multiple legs – which applies far more to countries of the Global South than those of the Global North – creates far more emissions than a direct route.

As a result of all this, some activist groups including the Climate Action Network recently called for the COP to be postponed (again) until it could be carried out inclusively. The COP is going ahead, but unfortunately, it still features exclusion and injustice.

The airline industry operates with a ‘hub and spoke’ model – meaning that some airports (like London Heathrow, Dubai International Airport, and Amsterdam Schiphol) are vast international hubs. From far away, you usually have to travel long-haul to these hubs if you want to get to any of their nearby smaller cities. That’s why so many of the routes to get world leaders to Glasgow include travelling through London or Amsterdam – these are the nearest major hubs.

Many of the possible routes provide hints at their respective countries’ colonial histories. This is why places like Nairobi in Kenya and Bridgetown in Barbados have direct flights to London, places like Luanda in Angola and Maputo in Mozambique have direct flights to Lisbon, and places like Bogotá in Colombia and Lima in Peru have direct flights to Madrid. Often these direct routes are run by the ‘flag carrier’ airline from the country which was historically the coloniser.

There are practical reasons this is the case too – for example, these countries are likely to share a common language (though of course this is often related to colonial history as well) – but looking at the data in researching commercial routes to COP, it’s hard to ignore the trends that appear before you.

In parallel, there are lots of long-reads about the links between climate change and colonialism, and research has been conducted into the coloniality of ecology too. This coloniality is why, for example, the Latin names for hundreds of bird species incorporate the surnames of European people, with most of these species appearing outside Europe, in formerly colonised countries.

The Working Group I submission to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, which was published in August, gave a stark warning of how slim the window of opportunity now is for us to limit warming to 1.5ºC. In each of the five emissions scenarios examined by the IPCC, warming was projected to surpass 1.5ºC (though it is important to note that in the lowest emissions scenario, warming recedes to 1.4ºC by the end of the century). Current policies have us on track for significantly more warming than this.

However, the ‘ratchet mechanism’ from Paris, exercised for the first time in Glasgow, is specifically designed to make these pledges, targets and policies more ambitious over time. This makes Glasgow’s conference enormously high stakes, and also a huge opportunity to show climate leadership. That’s why our message to world leaders is to make it count.

Over the last five or six years, there has been an unprecedented upswell in awareness and action on climate. The progress that has been made in such a short time since the Paris Agreement is truly astounding. It’s still not enough yet, but the needle is starting to turn.

This applies both in terms of policy, but also the economics of climate change, with the price of renewables plummeting over the past few years, as well as the public awareness and consumer attitudes; increasing numbers of people are choosing plant-based diets, electric vehicles and gaining an improved public understanding of the importance of climate change.

The latest IPCC report shows us that we need action on climate now. The movement has never been bigger, and we are really only just getting started. In Glasgow, what we need is an understanding of the gravity of climate change, coupled with a fierce determination that will motivate us to drag down emissions and restore nature. The action we’ve seen in these past few years should encourage us, and give us hope that we can seize these immense opportunities and set things right.

Firstly, we took a list of all 197 Parties to the UNFCCC, alongside listing their seats of government. We chose the seat of government because not all capital cities are used to host government offices or agencies (for example, in the Netherlands the capital is Amsterdam but the government is based in The Hague).

Where multiple candidate cities existed (for example, South Africa, which has three capital cities), the executive capital was chosen, as this is where the relevant world leader would be ordinarily based.

Where the seat of government does not contain an airport, or where a short overland journey could reduce the number of flight legs required, then the nearest accessible airport was selected as the origin airport. For example, we used Amsterdam Schiphol as the origin airport for the Netherlands, even though The Hague is 28 miles from Amsterdam. This process ignores political or other reasons which would otherwise exclude the nearest airport from use. 

Having established the origin airport and the destination airport (Glasgow), a simple online flights search was carried out for each world leader’s journey, to establish the optimal route for the journey. This journey was split out into its constituent legs, and each leg was entered as a return premium class flight into the ICAO Carbon Emissions Calculator to produce an estimate of the emissions output in tCO2e.

After a few iterations of this process, data for the final legs of many journeys could often be copied across, since so many routes to Glasgow arrive via a popular hub airport nearby – most often Heathrow, Dublin, Amsterdam Schiphol or Paris Charles de Gaulle. The data shows that 4 countries’ representatives were able to travel to Glasgow in a single flight, 81 were able to reach Glasgow in two flights, 85 in three, and the remaining 27 in four.

A small number of journeys produced by the online search required an airport change between legs of the route on arrival (such as arriving into London Gatwick but leaving London via Heathrow). This was allowed.

A number of assumptions were required for producing the calculations for this campaign, primarily due to lack of available data, including:

• That all world leaders would attend COP 26, and that all of them would fly from the location of their seat of government. Comprehensive lists of world leaders attending the COP are not available, nor are there lists including where they will be travelling from, or their mode of transport.
• That world leaders would fly via commercial routes. In reality, some world leaders will fly to Glasgow on governmental planes, landing at military airbases and so on, as opposed to taking commercially available routes.
• That all world leaders will travel in premium class or equivalent. This makes a difference because emissions calculations per passenger are often produced as a function of the increased physical space afforded to the passenger in their specific class of travel.

Once we had completed the calculations for the amount of carbon dioxide emitted to get an individual from the seat of government of every UNFCCC Party to Glasgow we summed them together, totalling 330.15 tonnes (which we rounded to 331 tonnes), and we added this as impact to the COP 26 forest profile. 

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