Our footprint: What does it look like?

Maximising our socio-economic impact: Spent and time analysis

We spent on average 22 US$ per person per day, for a total of 4000 US$ per person over six months.

We spent the most in Sri Lanka, due to the plane ticket from Paris and tourism activities only, such as scuba diving. In Malaysia we only spent 5 US$ per person per day as we volunteered most of our time there - 2 weeks.

Zooming on our spent profile: to capture the multidimensional aspects of our socio-economic impact, we use proxies:

1. percentage spent in small businesses, subjectively defined as family-owned enterprises, small in size and off the touristic track (41%); 
2. percentage of our spent in local businesses and products (82%); and
3. percentage of our spent in organizations that have for objective to improve social or environmental conditions (6%).

Zooming on our time spent: on average, we volunteered one third of our time. We participated in three projects in total, all around the theme of agriculture.

In Cambodia, we stayed two weeks on a permaculture farm and did some work for an NGO. In Thailand, we continued our work for the NGO in Cambodia. In Malaysia, we spent another two weeks on an organic fig farm. In Taiwan we stayed two weeks on an organic rice farm and in the Philippines four days on a permaculture farm.

Travelers can benefit countries they visit by spending money in the right place and giving in-kind through volunteering e.g. (although it depends on what type of volunteering).

Straight to conclusions and method

Minimizing our environmental impact: Greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and plastic waste

The tourism industry is a large contributor to climate change and pollution in their host countries. Here again, different type of travellers will have smaller or larger footprints.

Our transportation led to the average emission of 22kg of GHG per person per day for total emissions over 4 tonnes per person.

These were higher in Sri Lanka due to the plane from Paris to Colombo (91% of our emissions in this country).

At this level we would need 3 planets to sustain our emissions, if we continue on this average over the full year, or we would need to plant over 4 hectares of tropical forest to compensate our emissions related to our transports.

Zooming on our GHG emissions from transport: If we had stayed home, we estimate that we would have emitted on average 5 times less GHG from our transportation (only in Malaysia did we emit less on average per person per day than at home).

Our journey therefore has a negative marginal impact on climate change. We note however that our use of public transport has helped lower our travel footprint by 30%.

We account for plastic waste from water bottles, bags and cups. In total, we wasted 3 kg of plastic, mainly in Sri Lanka where the waste collection and management system is not performing as well as in Thailand and Cambodia. When and where we could, we reused and refilled plastic bottles, therefore avoiding the use and waste of 6kg of plastic, mostly after we obtained a water filter bottle in Taiwan.

Although we undertook every effort to monitor and minimize the environmental footprint from our transports, one way, perhaps the only way to reduce our impact and act as responsible citizens is not to travel. In these 6 months, we emitted 4 tonnes of GHGs only in transports (plane), when the total emissions per person should not exceed 3 tons per year in order to maintain temperature increase below 2 degrees. If we had stayed home we would have emitted less than 400kg of GHGs. This figure only accounts for transportation - it ignores the impact of food consumption and energy use in hotels - which can represent around 50% of tourism emissions as a recent article in the scientific journal Nature showed.

Does it mean that travelling is all bad? The analysis of our expenditures show that there are several ways to travel, leading to different budgets and impact. In Sri Lanka, our first destination, we spent 40 US$ per person per day our highest level so far, as we only engaged in tourism activities as opposed to volunteering. This country is our lowest level of local spent: we had to buy a ticket from a non-Sri Lankan plane company from Paris and we emitted about 1 ton of GHG each only to get there. It is also the country where we used the most plastics. As a comparison, we spent an average 5 US$ per person per day in Malaysia, 64% of this amount in small businesses, emitting only 2 kg of GHG on average for transport, less than we would in the UK. In this country we volunteered for 71% of our time and reduced our plastic waste.

We love travelling and there is no model that can demonstrates all the positive it brings us personally. Although our tool is not fully able to capture all of our negative and positive impacts, it sheds light on one crucial fact: we need to rethink completely our relationship to travel. Even with our best efforts our travelling ways are far from "sustainable" as it stands today. 

Tourism represents 8% of the world's GHG emissions, and this share is growing. At the same time, it employs directly and indirectly 9.6% of workers and generates over 10% of the world's GDP. It is therefore particularly important to understand the positive and negative impact of the choices we make, and engage with businesses and organisations locally to incite them to do their fair share of the work.

So what did we learn?

Accommodation (3/5): Best score in Taiwan and Cambodia, where we camped 10 days and stayed 2 weeks in a place with 100% renewable energy. Our score is globally good as we only stayed in hostels, guesthouses, dorms rather than resorts.

Spend (2.5/5): We favor local and small businesses most of the time. However, we spent little overall in positive impact businesses, apart from Cambodia - in particular in Siem Reap.

Volunteering (3/5): We spent around 2 months out of 6 volunteering in farms and agricultural projects. 

Transport (4/5): This is our worst score, mainly due to taking the plane. We will explore options to decrease air travel and compensate our emissions.

Plastic (3/5): Since we bought our water filter, we greatly improved our score! We do need to work on plastic bags though.

Food (2/5): Most of the time, we favour the vegetarian option. In some of the farms we worked in, we were fed local, organic food. Sri Lanka was the easiest country to find vegetarian options.

Overall: assessing our performance in relative terms

5: Worst

0: Best