Hazardous holidays

At long last, the summer holidays are finally about to begin. Time to get away from it all for a while, leave our stressful jobs behind and preferably travel abroad to luxury hotels. Paul Peeters is also packing his suitcase. The researcher is heading to northern Italy by train. And that’s something more people should do. The travelling by train part, that is.

Peeters, who is conducting PhD research on sustainable transport & tourism at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, calculated that tourists account for about five percent of global CO2 emissions. He recently published a paper in the Journal of Transport Geography, in which he describes a emissions-related projection into the future of tourism. Emissions are projected to grow at an average rate of 3.2 percent per year up to 2035. “This increase is problematic”, Peeters says, “as globally a reduction of total emissions by three to six percent is required to avoid ‘dangerous’ climate change.”

If Peeters’ prediction about the pace with which tourists are polluting is correct, and the world (miraculously) succeeds in reducing carbon emission on all other fronts, then in 2050 the atmosphere will still have reached a dangerous concentration of greenhouse gas, due solely to tourism. Put differently: in 2050 half of all emissions would be caused by tourism.

And this scenario isn’t all that far fetched, according to Peeters. He says it is ‘imaginable’ to obtain a reduction of eighty percent of greenhouse gas emission for almost all aspects of our societies and economies, “but it’s difficult to find a future tourist travel system consistent with such CO2 emission reductions.”
The emissions caused by luxury hotels, with their energy devouring air-condition systems and mania about providing guests with clean sheets and towels every day, can be dealt with. The real catch is the flights. Peeters: “There are no technologies that can lead to enough reduction in carbon dioxide emission by airplanes. The laws of physic simply don’t allow it.”
“Currently, improvements in aviation result in a reduction in emission of one to two percent per flight. But worldwide each year the number of flights increases by five percent. It’s a tricky situation.”

So what can we do? Will it still be possible in 2035 to go on holidays? Peeters sketches two possible bright future scenarios.
In the first scenario, we almost entirely stop flying and travel by car. In that case, worldwide tourism (the number of trips and nights spent abroad) can more than double and we will still succeed in lowering the emissions from tourism (flightless tourism) by three to six percent per year.
The second scenario is based on the current state of travel, in which about 17 percent of all trips is done by airplane. We can continue flying this much if, in all other cases where we would normally take a car, we take trains or busses instead. “If we do that we can even triple the current five billion trips that we all currently take collectively per year.”
And Peeters wants to note one more interesting finding: apparently there is no link between the way we travel and our level of happiness. 

Het wordt de officiële start van de nationale dialoog over nanotechnologie. Tijdens het evenement presenteert het Rathenau Instituut het boek ‘Leven als bouwpakket’, een essaybundel over de mogelijkheden van het ontwerpen, verbouwen en opbouwen van het leven met nanotechnologie.

Het Rathenau-instituut zet hier vraagtekens bij: ‘Zullen we binnenkort mensen en andere levensvormen verbeteren, ontwerpen en bouwen? Meer maakbaarheid leidt niet vanzelf tot meer gezondheid, vrijheid of duurzaamheid. Wat willen we winnen? Wat kunnen we verliezen? Hoe kunnen we de nieuwe technologische golf een duurzame richting laten inslaan?’

Belangstellenden kunnen dinsdag 29 september het begin van de maatschappelijke discussie bijwonen in de Nieuwe Kerk in Den Haag met Jan Douwe Kroeske, Maria van der Hoeven, Peter Nijkamp en Eboman.

Verder bijzonderheden op de website van nanopodium.