Why ‘flight shame’ is making people swap planes for trains

Last month I stepped into an aeroplane for the first time in five years.

I was leaving my home in London and taking a flight across the Atlantic to join my partner in Costa Rica. The last time I flew was in 2014, while living in Bordeaux, France. Getting to my sister’s hen party in Scotland by train, my usual option, would have taken days that I didn’t have, so then too I bit the bullet and took a flight.

The reason I have avoided flying for so long is its hefty carbon footprint. Since I was a teenager I’d had a growing niggling guilt about the emissions from flying, as I found out more and more about climate change and its impacts. After all, flying is probably the most carbon-intensive activity you can do, on an hour-to-hour basis. Eventually this led me to vow only to do it if absolutely necessary.

And I’m not alone. Over the past year or so, an anti-flying movement known as “flight shame” – or flygskam in Swedish, where the movement began – has been gathering pace in Europe.

The term speaks of the guilt of taking flights at a time when the world needs to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. For me, it points to a painful contrast between the happy-go-lucky indulgence of a weekend flight and the devastating real world impact of climate change. Others have referred to it as the embarrassment of flying despite being environmentally “woke”.

But it is also changing our ideas of how, why and where we travel.

Although “shame” is a very negative term, the goals are positive – for people who take part in the movement as well as for the environment. Importantly, it is less about “shaming” other people who fly than changing your own travel patterns.

What’s more, the aim of many promoting less flying is by no means to discourage people from exploring the world. “Not flying doesn’t mean not travelling,” says Anna Hughes, who runs the Flight Free 2020 campaign in the UK. “There are so many places that we can access by other means.”

The movement is instead about revelling in the slow, deliberate journeys that are possible without aviation. One of the obvious choices is train travel, which has one-10th the emissions of flying, Hughes notes. “And, from my point of view, it’s way more enjoyable,” she adds.

And even if it does take more time, other forms of transport can be more rewarding. Like Hughes, I have experienced the joys of slow travel in my five earthbound years, from late-night conversations with a couple of Iranian travellers on an overnight train to Verona, to sipping a whisky in the bar of the Caledonian sleeper to Edinburgh.

Slow travel needn’t be limited to short distances, either. Roger Tyers is a climate sociologist who recently returned from a “no-flying fieldtrip” to China, which took him two weeks by train each way. It might sound like a daunting expedition, but he is glowing about his train trip. “It was a fascinating journey,” he says. “I’ve seen some incredible things that you just wouldn’t see getting on a plane.” He lists a slew of other advantages: digital detox, reading, talking to different people, no jetlag. “And just appreciating the size of our planet and how diverse it is.”

To put the difference between train and plane in perspective, it only takes a return flight from London to Moscow to use up one-fifth of your “carbon budget” for the whole year. This budget is the amount of carbon each person can emit in 2030 while still avoiding dangerous levels of global warming. Making the same journey by train would use roughly one-50th of your yearly budget.

“The more you understand about the climate impact of flying, the more you feel guilty whenever you get on a plane,” says Hughes.

The no flying movement is also gaining traction elsewhere. In addition to the UK’s Flight Free 2020 campaign, other countries such as Canada, Belgium and France are starting their own initiatives. In each case, signatories are only technically committing to staying on the ground if 100,000 other people from their country sign up, although some may choose not to fly regardless.

Making a choice to cut back or cut out flying in your personal life is one thing, but work poses another problem for people who fly for their jobs. Some organisations are already getting behind the movement, though. The Danish broadsheet newspaper Politiken, for example, has outlined plans to stop domestic flying by its journalists, offset the flights which are taken and refocus its travel section to trips accessible by train.

Academia is another flight-heavy industry where people are making changes. Several noted climate scientists are already very public about their efforts to fly less both for work and their personal lives, while 650 academics are supporting a campaign to greatly reduce flying. Alice Larkin, a climate scientist at the University of Manchester who has not flown for over a decade, argues that institutions need to change their expectations of how often their staff fly.

“I can imagine a world in 20 years’ time where people laugh about the fact that we used to fly halfway around the world to have a meeting – it’s like, why would you do that?” she says, adding that good virtual connections could go a long way towards reducing flights for meetings.

Larkin thinks it is particularly important for academics working in climate change to set the example by reducing their flying. “If you go to your GP and they are sitting there smoking and they are telling you to give up smoking,” she says. “Then you think, ‘Well, I’m not sure I believe that it’s actually bad for me.’”

The sociologist Tyers argues that the social effect of personal choices such as not flying goes much further than the emissions saved from that one flight. “I think that people waste a lot of time talking about individual action versus collective action,” he says. “I’m not expecting everybody to do what I’ve done. But I think if anything the kind of extreme nature of my journey has raised certain awareness of this issue. I would say the people who I’m hoping the message gets to are the people who could substitute flights for something else.”

This view is backed up by research. In a set of interviews, Steve Westlake, a doctoral candidate at Cardiff University, found that the choice to avoid flying had social knock-on effects. The interviewees indicated that it was the commitment shown by people who don’t fly that influenced them to try and fly less too.

“Because it’s difficult, that has quite a strong communicative effect,” says Westlake. “So people go, ‘Wow, you’ve given up flying completely?”

Of course, it’s very understable that not everyone will be willing or able to cut out flying in this way. Cutting down as much as possible can still reduce your carbon footprint by a huge amount. I have never made a hard rule never to fly again, but to try only to do it rarely and when it really seems essential – such as my move this year to Costa Rica.

Leveraging something as seemingly negative as shame to aid climate action could have its pitfalls, though. “As a way of trying to push [going flight-free] I don’t really like it,” says Westlake. “Because all the language around shaming, and guilt-tripping and virtue-signalling has got a lot of sort of negative connotations.”

Hughes agrees, but says campaigns like hers also have to be hard-hitting. “Feeling shame for something in the right proportions can actually be really positive,” she says. “We’re happy to feed into that niggling knowledge that this is not actually the greatest thing I should be doing, maybe I should stop doing it.”

The answer, again, might come from Sweden and another climate buzzword – tagskryt, which translates as the rather more positive and proactive “train bragging”.

Climate change is harming the planet, and it may be harming our mental health too.