Earlier this year, 41 per cent of French people polled said they would be in favour of people being limited to four flights per year
A busy terminal at Dublin Airport. Flying accounts for less than 3% of carbon emissions but is hard to decarbonise. Photograph: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie
Airlines apps that show whether the plane you’re waiting to board has landed or is still 500 miles away are a big improvement. They could be joined shortly by new ways of tracking down wayward luggage. And Gianluca Grimalda, a climate researcher at Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy think tank, was making global headlines after saying his job was at risk because he refused to fly home at short notice from Papua New Guinea, where he’d just done six months of fieldwork.
Just 11 per cent of the global population flew in 2018, researchers reckon. Only 2-4 per cent went abroad and most were set to fly just once a year. A tiny group of very frequent flyers, about 1 per cent of the world population, is estimated to account for 50 per cent of commercial airline emissions.