How Three COP29 Attendees Got to Baku Without a Long-Haul Flight

(Bloomberg) -- When policymakers, climate scientists and activists gather at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, next week, almost all will have taken a route not known for being sustainable: a long-haul flight.

That is except for a trio of UK-based corporate sustainability advisers who have instead taken 14 trains, three buses and, soon, a 70-minute flight across Europe over two weeks. They avoided plastic forks and water bottles, paper coffee cups and gasoline-powered taxis, turning an extreme case of climate concern into new ways of travel.

“Our tagline from the very beginning was, ‘Saving the planet shouldn’t be boring,’” said Jess Silva, who spoke from Ankara, Turkey, on the eighth day of the trip with her fellow co-founders of Carbon Jacked, a British environmental consulting group. While difficult to confirm, the group estimates their travel plan slashed emissions by eight times relative to flying.

Aviation accounts for about 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and long-haul flights play an outsize role in that. Flights longer than 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) make up 5% of plane trips but burn almost 40% of jet fuel globally, according to a study published last month in the . Those types of flights have expanded at six times the rate of short-haul flights since the mid-1990s, and they are poised to inflict further damage on the planet in the coming decades, the study found.

“There is sort of a misperception about where aviation emissions come from,” said Giulio Mattioli, a research fellow at TU Dortmund University in Germany and a study author. Policy solutions have focused on short-haul flights, with countries like France and Austria seeking to restrict them, yet that provides relatively limited climate benefits, according to the study. 

Technological solutions like solar-powered passenger jets are still far out of reach while sustainable aviation fuel remains costly and in short supply, so researchers say the most climate-friendly way forward is to manage the demand for long-distance flights. People like Silva and her co-founders Jack Curtis and Jacques Sheehan have taken that into their own hands.

Their route to the UN summit, known as COP29, began with a Eurostar train from London to Paris, followed by another train to Stuttgart, Germany, and then to Budapest, Hungary. That was Day 1. The rest of their itinerary had them traveling from Hungary to Romania to Bulgaria, through Turkey, then Georgia and finally on to Baku, which they will have to fly to on Sunday because the land border is closed, according to local media.

“Our message is not, ‘You can never fly again or you’re an evil person,’” Sheehan said. “It’s just, ‘Sometimes, you don’t always have to.’” Their plea to businesses and individuals, who they advise on sustainability, is to practice what they call “imperfect environmentalism:” doing the most you can even if not everything.

But for two weeks, the group of three tried to be as perfect as they could. They even contacted the Azerbaijani consulate in London and submitted an application to the government seeking special permission to cross into the country via train or ferry. Those efforts have been to no avail. The consulate did not respond to a request for comment.

The weekslong trek is the founders’ second since they formed Carbon Jacked in 2020. The first, to the Greek island Naxos in 2022, garnered a bump in social media traffic and messages from followers who said they were inspired to take similar trips of their own. 

As for what’s next, Silva, Sheehan and Curtis have their eyes on COP30 next year in Belém, Brazil. 

“We’ve very loosely been looking at options,” Curtis said. “I want to get a cargo ship.”

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