Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers blog

With so many readily available low-cost flights, many of us don’t think much of hopping on a plane for a weekend break or short holiday. Armed with a guidebook and a sense of adventure, the world is in easier reach than ever before but for how long? We’re being asked to consider the impact of our holidays now, not whether we can afford them but whether the planet can.

Tony Wheeler, founder of the legendary Lonely Planet travel books is tackling just that as he asks: “How do we make travelling world wide a sustainable thing in the long term?”

Tony’s own enthusiasm for travel, a passion that turned into a career started when he took a six month overland trip through Asia with his wife Maureen in 1972. They ended up in Sydney, Australia with less than a dollar between them but by the following year they had set up Lonely Planet Publications to publish ‘Across Asia on the Cheap’, the story of their journey. Today, Lonely Planet guidebooks are often thought of as backpacker’s bibles. For a couple that have spent so much of their lives traveling, Tony and Maureen still love to leave most of the hard work to their capable 400-strong staff and spend six months of the year visiting far flung corners of the globe.

Check him out posing his question and consider your thoughts because we’d all like to know how it’s possible to continue to travel but care more about the places we love.

Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries and it’s estimated that by 2020, 1.5billion of us will be travelling each year. Far flung places are no longer just distant fantasies, and not restricted to the young. Older generations especially the over-50 ‘empty nesters’ whose children have left home are leading the way, with destinations such as South America and China top of their list.

In Britain, most of us (around 80%) are concerned about climate change. Around 35% believe that it’s us humans causing the problem and that’s partly linked to air travel, which is why there’s been much recent publicity around calculating our carbon footprints and carbon-offsetting.

What is it? Carbon-offsetting is our way of giving something back to nature. Traditionally planting trees to neutralize the negative impact that flights and the amount of carbon dioxide they produce have on the atmosphere. Put simply: If traveling in a sustainable way should be that we do little or no damage to the country by going there, can we justify that a return flight to Rome, for example, produces over 0.31 tonnes of carbon dioxide which is as bad for the environment as leaving the kettle boiling for 16 days solid. However, that flight to Italy only costs £2.45 to offset and it’s not just about planting trees…

Specialist organisation Climate Care, who operates offset schemes on behalf of UK travel companies (such as First Choice and Travelcare) puts 20% of its funding towards planting trees with the rest going to micro-loans in the developing world where the emissions are being off-set in inventive ways. In India, farmers irrigating crops have been able to replace diesel water pumps with manual ones to cut a massive 0.65 tonnes of CO2 per pump each year. They also distributed 10,000 energy efficient lightbulbs to schools and homes in Kazakhstan and run projects across the globe.

Answerers have already been discussing how to reduce their own carbon emissions closer to home and whether countries with famous tourist attractions such as Machu Picchu in Peru need to address the balance between how they need to be preserved and how many visitors are too many.

Ideas are what we need! How best can we limit the damage caused by travel? Let Tony and the Answers team know yours as we undertake this great travel debate.

–Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers team