Low Carbon Travel

The UK Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) used to advocate the following four point approach to reducing energy use and carbon emissions:

• Calculate, Avoid, Reduce, Offset

This is still a good approach, and we strongly advocate following this, step by step, and the following pages contain information to help club members do this:

Calculate

If you want to reduce your energy use and carbon emissions, start by measuring it. There are many carbon calculators freely available on the internet to help with this, and we have included a link to one in these pages. Members might be interested in measuring other aspects of their energy use in their lives, in addition to their ski trips.

The major component of energy use for an average piste skiing trip is travel to the resort, with heating of accommodation being the next biggest. For the average hut-to-hut ski tour, it won't be far wrong just to include the energy consumption for travel. If you know that there are other factors that should be included, try to include these as well.

Avoid

We ski because we are passionate about it, and we don't want to avoid doing it. Some members regulate their personal impact in different ways ("never flying"","never taking long haul flights", or "only making a remote trip every other year", or ...). Others look at their ski tour in the context of the rest of their life ("turning the heating down vs flying"). These are personal choices, and in these pages we are not advocating particular choices - we are only making it easier for people who wish to make low carbon choices.

Reduce

Travel by train or coach, share a car with others, fit two or so weeks together, add other activities to the ski trip travel. Follow the links at the bottom of the page for suggestions on low carbon travel.

Offset

If you cannot reduce your energy use any further, consider buying carbon credits to offset your carbon emissions.

The Club has an agreement with the Cochabamba Project to buy carbon credits at £7.00 per tonne. We chose this project through a rigorous assessment process. This ensured that the carbon credits will be "real, measurable, additional, monitored and legal", and we can see directly what the money is being used for. The Project will provide us with regular reports on their progress and our contribution to this.

How are you travelling?

It is worth just mentioning the relative carbon emissions from different forms of transport. We'll take the example of travelling from London to Geneva. There is no absolute answer, as particular vehicles, planes or other services will vary in their emissions, depending on many factors, and different carbon calculators available on the web use different models that give differing weights to these factors. With those caveats, representative estimates for the trip are (for a return trip from London to Geneva):

Don't take these too literally, but they give a reasonable comparison. For instance, travelling by car can be better than flying, IF the car is full (do the calculation for your car and your journey). Even so, it is nowhere near as good as travelling by train.

Where are you going?

This page has been prepared with the 2015 touring season in mind. We want to make it easy and cheap for Eagles to chose low carbon travel options, particularly to the popular European destinations. The information for each destination below will include recommendations and links for booking, and some special offers for Eagles.

The important transport hubs for the 2015 programme are listed below. This should cover a large part of the European travel needs for 2015:

•         Geneva (for Chamonix, and access to the Swiss train service for the Valais and Oberland)
•         Moutiers (for the Tarentaise and the Maurienne)
•         Grenoble (for the Ecrins, Queyras, Ubaye etc)
•         Innsbruck (for the Silvretta, Stubai and Venediger)
•         Zurich (for Andermatt and the Engadine)

For information on driving to European destinations, follow this link, and for travel to other European destinations not listed here, here is a page with some links to useful sites.

If you have any comments on this page, or any useful information on low carbon travel options, please email us. We're particularly keen to get feedback which improves the information in this section.