Skip to main content

Why are people still flying to climate conferences by private jet?

 

Rishi Sunak, David Cameron and King Charles are just three of the more than 70,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries at the latest UN climate summit in Dubai, COP28. But they are among hundreds who will have travelled there by private jet. In fact, the UK prime minister, foreign secretary and king even travelled in three separate planes.

At COP27 in Egypt last year, around 315 private jet journeys took place. This is an extraordinary statistic, especially as fewer world leaders attended that COP, as many were busy at a G20 summit in Bali.

That’s why we set up a team of academic experts to estimate the carbon footprint of travel to this year’s meeting, COP28 in Dubai, for different modes of transport including private jets. We ultimately want to empower attendees to make informed climate-conscious travel choices.

We also compared the carbon footprints for the past three COPs to help see where the conferences could be located in order to dissuade attendees from using private jets, unless absolutely essential for security. The use of private jets last year – and presumably this year too, though we don’t yet have full data – suggests this is becoming the new norm and has moved beyond just essential world leaders.


Read more here!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Retrospective Overview of Factors that Influence Guinea Worm Epidemic in Northern Region of Ghana

This article retrospectively examines the factors which caused Guinea Worm Disease (Dracunculiasis) to spread to epidemic levels, so as to serve as the basis for formulating a national preventive agenda to reinforce the preventive measures which have been put in place to prevent the disease from re-emerging. The hybrid conceptual framework of disease diffusion and disease ecology was used. The mixed method research design was used to collect data from a total of 11 administrative districts. Primary data was obtained from a total of 860 respondents. To achieve a representative distribution of respondents, they were proportionately selected with respect to the populations of their respective districts. A key Informant interview was conducted. Download the full article for free  here!
  Carbon   catch-22 : the pollution in our soil Bad behaviour doesn’t usually have good consequences but our fossil fuel and fertiliser habits may have had some “good” environmental side-effects.  Our new research  suggests that the last 200 years of pollution have increased the carbon stored in soils across natural ecosystems in Britain. And this locking in of carbon in soils provides an offset for some of our carbon emissions. But the catch-22 is if we kick our polluting habits, this carbon is at risk of returning to our atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Read the rest of the article  here!

Climate crisis could reverse progress in achieving gender equality

People who directly depend on the natural world for their livelihoods, like farmers and fishers, will be among the greatest victims of the climate crisis. In vulnerable hotspots, such as the arid lands of Kenya and Ethiopia, farming communities are already struggling with droughts and water scarcity that kill their cattle and threaten their very survival. The glacial-fed river basins of the Himalayan mountains, or the deltas of Bangladesh, India and Ghana, are increasingly prone to floods, landslides and powerful cyclones. As a result, men are often migrating further to keep their families going, looking for casual work in neighbouring towns or villages for a few days or weeks at a time, or to cities further away. Many try to return home when they can, with whatever they have earned. But during their absence, the entire burden of maintaining the family is on women. Read the full article  here!