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.

Comments

The Viking Geo

Video's more your thing? The Viking Geo has a wide array of fantastic videos to support your learning, browse through the channels playlists to find the units that fit our course. The channel can be found here.

Economic development and disease

This short paper explores the close links between diseases in human populations and the economic systems that govern the life of their communities. Read more here!

Cancer in the UK. 10-Year Cancer Plan: call for evidence

Foreword from the Secretary of State This country’s fight against COVID-19 has shown just what we can do when we join forces against a common threat. During the pandemic we used this country’s ingenuity and endeavour to put the virus on the back foot, but now is the time to apply this same spirit and determination to another threat: cancer. It is time to declare a national war on cancer, which is the biggest cause of death from disease in this country. It is a menace that has taken far too many people before their time and caused grief and suffering on a massive scale. As a country, we have made great progress in recent years; in just the last 15 years, one-year survival has increased by more than 10 percentage points, a remarkable achievement. But despite this progress, I am determined that we will go much further. This is essential if we are to complete the job of recovering cancer services following the pandemic and use the impressive advances in diagnosis and treatments to radicall...

The Kennet Geog Blog

Search This Blog