Twenty-four trains, nine countries, 13,500 miles. They are the numbers behind the train journey one man took from Southampton in the UK to eastern China. Roger Tyers, 37, spent a month on board trains and over $2,500 — almost triple the cost of a return flight to travel to the Chinese port city Ningbo.
It was the climate crisis, not a love of trains, that drove Tyers to choose this route over a return flight. Tyers said that he felt it necessary to stop flying when UN climate experts warned that the world has less than 11 years to avoid terrible levels of global warming. Tyers said that his train journey to China produced almost 90% less emissions than a return flight. A passenger on a return flight from London to New York brings as much CO2 as the average person in the European Union does by heating their home each year, according to the European Commission.
Tyers is not the only person to avoid air travel in response to climate change. Thousands of people worldwide have publicly pledged to stop flying, including teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who has inspired youth climate protests around the world.
Activist Maja Rosen started the "Flight Free" campaign in Sweden in 2018 with the aim of encouraging 100,000 people not to fly for one year. Although only around 14,000 people signed the online "#flightfree2019" pledge, Rosen said that the campaign had made more people aware of the urgency of the climate crisis and motivated them to travel by train more often. Rosen, who stopped flying 12 years ago, says one of the problems is that people feel there's no point in what you do as an individual. The campaign is about making people aware that if we do this together, we can actually make a huge difference.
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