Flight Shame – the end of World Birding?

That is a very powerful message, Greta. And you are right. Sure, we all recycle, we avoid taking the car for small short errands, we turn off lights, and try to eat less beef and dairy to lessen our carbon footprint.

But as birders with our cars, we twitch occasional vagrants to see new birds for our national lists, and we fly around the globe to increase our overall life list, knowing perfectly well that this behaviour is egoistic and purely for our own enjoyment.

Sure, we know that when we fly, that just one return transoceanic flight is equivalent to not eating beef for half a year or so.  
Non-birders, or those who have given up world birding because of the huge costs, point fingers at us. They consider themselves holier-than-thou because now they don’t do any overseas flights anymore.

In Swedish, much thanks to Greta, we now have a new word – flygskam (flight shame). We really ought to fly less because flights are such a heavy emitter of CO2.

How can we keep on doing what we love with a (…ahem…) “clean” conscience?

Well, it turns out that we really should not feel too bad if you choose your flights wisely. First of all birding tourism has an enormous positive impact on bird conservation and spreading eco-dollars to local economies that normally does not get mainstream tourism.

On a global scale flights involved in birding eco tourism represents extremely small part compared to all other types of business and leisure flights. It is not like we are having business meetings in Brussels, London or New York once or twice a month, or that we go for beach holidays in Phuket or Cancun. Our flights take us to places where our presence makes a positive impact for conservation.

Yet, in order to silence the naysayers and allow us to continue to enjoy our occasional extravagances, we need to start to mitigate our carbon footprint. There are many ways of doing this.

Here are five strategies to a clean(er) conscience when you travel the world to see new birds.

1. Everything is relative. Don’t buy a car. Don’t have kids. 

A great book which compares different actions it terms of how much carbon is released for different products and activities is How bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon footprint of everything. 
Here you can read, that a flight return London to LA in economy class is equivalent of 3.4 tons of CO2

Owning and driving a car is equals many transoceanic flights and if you don’t get any kids you are good for between 30-100 transoceanic flight per kid, depending on how carbon savvy their parents are and how carbon economic the kids become themselves.

2. Influence others. 

• Don’t waste. Show others to be less wasteful. Everything counts. All leftover food should be eaten. Always SAY NO to single use plastics.When you travel, bring your refill coffee mug, water bottle, your own cutlery, bags for shopping and your own containers for doggy bag purpose when you go to a restaurant. Say no to plastic straws.
• Rideshare. Look for public transport options rather that cars. Tale train or bus instead of flights for shorter trips.
• Buy local produce. The less transport involved to get the consumer the product the better. Do you need to buy strawberries in December if you live in the northern hemisphere?
• Opt for less beef, lamb and dairy. While going vegan is the absolutely best for the environment, heavily reducing your meat consumption is a good compromise, especially if you can influence friends and co-workers to do the same. It will be far harder to convince your friends to become vegans or vegetarians, than just reducing the meat frequency. 
Two of the best examples I have seen are Tree Huggers Graham Hill’s 3 min Ted Talk 
Why I am a weekday vegetarian.

I first heard about the OMD concept in Tim Ferriss’s interview with the James and Susan Cameron. On the recent filming of Avatar 2 and 3 back to back during a year, the whole set was fed plant based food for lunch everyday as a free meal. If anyone wanted to, they could go next door and get a Big Mac, but soon OMD became the very popular default for the crew.

Hearing about OMD led to our commitment at Kolibri Expeditions to serve One Meal a Day – plant based on our Peru tours. After all, it is only One Meal per Day. With a regular breakfast and dinner, it shall not hurt anyone. On the contrary, it will increase awareness – also among our staff.
 It is a small step for us, but it could have a huge impact.

Ecotourism in the tropics supports local habitat conservation and bird conservation. Every hectare (2.5 acres) of tropical forest that is cleared for pasture, mining, agriculture is equivalent of 500 tons of carbon. That is roughly equivalent to 150 return flights from Europe to Peru.

Birding tourism prevents deforestation. Beach tourism and Disneyland tourism does not.

I can honestly say that with around 500 birders who have gone to Bosque Unchog to see the Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager the last 10 years and each donating $20 to the community, it has literally saved some 100 ha of forest from fire.

It protected the locality for this rare bird, as well as it gave the community an incentive to protect the forest.

All over the worlds there are thousands of such projects where areas are saved because of a few visiting birders. In many areas these small projects grow to more general ecotourism destinations and to small eco and adventure tourism industries, such as Mindo and Tandayapa valley in Ecuador. 

Birding tourism with a conservation mindset is beneficial in the long run and something you should continue with.

4. Carbon offset. 

It is not difficult to offset your carbon footprint with donations to various projects that mitigates carbon emissions elsewhere.

The big drawback for birders however may be that perhaps we are somewhat too suspicious of the way the money will be spent. Is it to finance forestry of monocultures of energy forests or timber production? This will hardly help any threatened species. Rather the contrary.
Or will there be wind farms in sensitive areas that will affect migrating birds?

What is really needed is a carbon offset program for birders. I am surprised that there are still no good overall programs that both creates habitat and conserves forests for endangered forest birds around the world. Wouldn’t it be great if all bird tour operators came together and started a carbon offset project for threatened forests birds together.

Here and there there have been some initiatives from birding organizations that involve projects of reforestation or conservation campaigns, but rarely have they had both the carbon offset factor as well as the bird conservation factor included.

A friend told me of one such project in South America which had an inspector flying business class from Europe to oversee the project. Even if the inspector paid for the ticket himself, it still sends the wrong signals.

Other carbon offset projects have been in areas far off the birder’s route in countries where few birders visit.

I think birder financed carbon offset projects should be possible to monitor by the birders and bird tour operators participating in such a program, themselves. 
I have started talking to some bird tour operators already and hopefully we can get something going soon.

Exactly how a birder’s initiative should look like I don’t know and it is open for discussion. Please join a Facebook group called World Birders Against Climate Change to discuss these issues further. It is my hope that there at least could be a number of projects nominated and peered-review by birders, which would be good candidates to donate to directly for the best impact.

Meanwhile, use any of these carbon calculators to see how large your carbon footprint has been this year. Most of these also have specified projects you can donate to.

Most airlines have their own offset programs.
These can be used of course if you don’t mind that it is not particularly bird oriented. This great site shows a summary of all airline offset programs. Some of these are verified on 40 different points.The offset programs vary in price depending on the locality and airline. From US$2 per ton CO2e with Kenya Airways to $US116 per ton CO2e with Japan Airlines.If you want to offset either via one of the programs in the calculators above, or directly to bird conservation forest projects which I hope will be listed by the end of the year, a good ballpark figure is to offset is $10 per tCO2e for projects in the third world.

I will certainly add up my own flight miles and see where I can make a donation – somewhere where my money can be channeled into saving habitat as well as creating new habitat for endangered species.

Finally, and this is perhaps the most important fact. It is time to get the politicians we deserve. While corporate America runs the US; and the EU is more interested in free market capitalism than habitat conservation, it is up to the voters to vote for the right people to rule our nations.

Donald Trump is undoubtedly one of the worst things that has happened to the climate in recent years and it goes on and on and on.

Meanwhile in Europe, the EU just accepted a trade deal with Mercosur of Southern South America summarized as “Cows for Cars“.

“This trade deal is a double whammy for the planet: it will exacerbate deforestation and encourage the production of big, dirty cars,” said Perrine Fournier, a campaigner at advocacy group Fern.

The coal industry and Big Oil still dominates finance and the influence on politics. Changes are coming, and this is perhaps where each and everyone of us can make the most impact in the coming years. Vote Green! Vote Sustainable!

Technology, will also make flights become more sustainable with bio fuel and hybrid engines in the near future, but it is vital that consumers and voters put their foot down and demand the development of these techniques. Make personal boycotts against companies with bad practices and vote for fossil fuel taxes for flights, as well as mandatory efficient carbon offset on all flights.

It is a good thing is that both European and US voters now are more concerned about climate change than ever. It will start to show in upcoming elections. How much this has to do with Greta Thunberg’s viral message to us adults is hard to measure, but it certainly got me pondering what can be done, and which is the ultimately reason why I write this blog post about birding and climate change. I do hope Greta wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Gunnar Engblom is a Swedish birder who lives in Peru since 1998, where he operates birdwatching and nature tours for Kolibri Expeditions and worldwide through 7WondersBirding. He is also a dedicated 3:04 marathon runner, right now training for Sydney Marathon. In 2016 Gunnar additionally re-launched his rock’n’roll singer career with his band Guran Guran.
The latest recording is called “Feels like Some Summer”. Check it out.