Swedish air travellers and voluntary carbon offsets: towards the co-creation of environmental value?

Abstract

There is now a broad consensus that aviation is a significant contributor to global warming. One question that thus arises is whether voluntary carbon-offsetting schemes can make a significant contribution to mitigating the contribution of aviation to climate change. These schemes have seen considerable growth in recent years, even though the overall amount of emissions offset remains negligible: tour operators and airlines offering voluntary carbon offsets report that customers show limited interested in these schemes. In the light of this, the article seeks to discuss the implications of voluntary carbon-offsetting schemes as a means of compensating emissions from aviation, and goes on to assess air travellers' knowledge of and attitudes to these schemes. Structural problems that have to be overcome to create broader interest in voluntary carbon offsetting are discussed in the context of co-creation of environmental value at the level of economic transactions between individual passengers (consumers) and airlines (producers), based on a survey of Swedish air travellers.

Keywords:

• aviation
• carbon offsetting
• climate neutral
• environmental value
• services

Notes

Calculation based on IPCC (2007a, 2007b). The IPCC (2007a) has noted that global emissions of carbon dioxide have to decline rapidly, possibly by as much as 50% by 2050 as compared to 1990, to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system. In 2005, global emissions of carbon dioxide were in the order of 26,400 Mega tonnes CO₂ (IPCC, 2007b). As humanity now comprises about 6.6 billion individuals, current emissions of carbon dioxide are thus in the order of 4 tonnes per capita per year. With a view to a the growing world population, average per capita emissions of 3.5 tonnes per capita per year are here assumed to be sustainable up to 2020, when they have to decline further.

The use of radiative forcing indexes (RFI) explains most of the variation in the calculation of emissions between offset providers. RFIs are used to capture the non-carbon contribution of aviation to global warming, particularly contrail-induced cirrus clouds and nitrogen oxides-related ozone generation (cf. Sausen et al., 2005). The contribution of various greenhouse gases to global warming is then compared to CO₂ and expressed as CO₂-equivalent (CO₂-e), based on an RFI (for a discussion on this see UNWTO-UNEP-WMO, 2008).