Low-Cost Airfares, Big-Time Carbon Footprint

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

There are only a handful of flights each day from Spain’s two largest cities to San Javier Airport here, a former military airfield now decked out with large smiling plastic sculptures of golf balls and huge soft-focus photos of waving palm trees, reflecting Murcia’s recently acquired status as a hot tourist destination.

It can cost euro 600, or about $935, to fly to Murcia from Madrid or Barcelona; there are no flights from other Spanish cities.

But it is extraordinarily easy and cheap to get to Murcia from nearly anywhere in Britain – and from many small cities in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, for that matter.

The arrival of low-cost airlines across Europe has created an explosion of new resorts in places like Murcia, catering to budget tourists.

But at a time when airlines are already the fastest-growing component of carbon dioxide emissions, tourism – particularly low- cost tourism – is rapidly laying down infrastructure that will almost certainly ensure a dangerous high carbon future.

“Low-cost carriers are growing at 9 percent a year and from an environmental point of view that is a problem,” said Christian Brand, a researcher at Oxford University who studies transportation emissions. “Their cheap prices encourage more travel.”

An advertisement by SearchIberia.com, a real estate site, proclaims: “New airline routes create rising property prices!”

Rising amidst the scrubby farmland here, low-cost resorts in Murcia are in turn feeding the need for low-cost flights.

Ryanair flies to Murcia three times a day from London, and once a day from other British airports like Luton, Liverpool, Bournemouth and East Midlands. Flights also leave from Glasgow and from Dublin and Shannon, Ireland. Other low-cost airlines offer daily flights from Blackpool, Bristol and Newcastle, England, to name a few.

Coming from Germany? Air Berlin flies to Murcia from Berlin, Bremen, Cologne, Dortmund, Dresden, Dusseldorf – and that is only to the Ds. Flights start at about euro 50, with tax, but are as low as euro 10 if booked far in advance.

There is a staggering environmental cost for this flying around: Two people flying round-trip from Leeds to Murcia generate about 1,400,000 grams of CO2, according to Brand’s calculations.

If they took a traditional driving vacation to the Lake District, instead, emissions would be less than 20,000 grams.

But with prices for gasoline and hotels at all-time highs in England and Germany, it is more economical to fly to Spain, even for a weekend, than to take a traditional driving vacation near home.

“With bed and breakfasts running pound(s)80 to pound(s)110 a night, it is cheaper to fly to Spain for the weekend than to drive to the Lake District, so there is incredible latent demand,” Brand said.

The number of passengers on European low-cost carriers more than doubled from 2004 to 2007, to 120 million a year, according to the European Low Fares Airline Association.

Encouraged by a profusion of budget airlines, Britons are now the world’s biggest owners of foreign second homes as a percentage of population.

A huge marketing effort encourages the trend.

“There are literally thousands of developments all offering different kinds of promotions,” David Browning, a retired engineer from Wales, said between shots on the Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course at his two-year-old pastel-stucco development.

When he was thinking of buying, the developer offered him a free flight and several nights in a hotel so that he could select a property, a common practice in a cut-throat market.

The growth in emissions from air passenger transport had “far exceeded growth by any other mode,” according to a report issued this year by the European Environment Agency.

From 1990 to 2005, the last full year for which data were available, total CO2 emissions from European Union aviation grew by 73 percent. Emissions are expected to grow by at least 5 percent a year, the report found.

“This could threaten the ability of the EU to meet increasingly ambitious emission reduction targets,” the report said.

The European Low Fares Airline Association argues that low-cost carriers are a “green” alternative compared with conventional airlines, since they tend to have newer, more efficient fleets and run at high occupancy, thus creating lower emissions per passenger.

But that does not take into account the huge growth in flying they have created.

In fact, no one has studied or quantified their cumulative emissions, as if no one – travel agents, tourists, policymakers – can bear the uncomfortable answer.

Even the UN World Tourism Organization, which is based in Madrid and last year publicly adopted sustainable tourism as one of its fundamental principals, has not looked the issue.

“As low cost carriers are becoming really major players, I’d guess there may be some extra attention devoted to them,” said Marcello Risi, the organization’s spokesman.

Passenger statistics at Murcia’s San Javier Airport over the past decade illustrate the magnitude of the problem: Arrivals increased from 88,608 in 1995, to 848,037 in 2004, to a staggering 1,905,182 last year – more than a 20-fold increase in a little more than a decade. That translates into more than one trillion grams of CO2 a year.

Demand for low-cost flights is galloping so fast that private investors are building a new international airport in Corvera, 20 minutes from Murcia.

“Murcia is fast becoming the golf destination in Spain and soon will overtake everywhere else in Europe,” the British Web site Direct2Spain says. “The low-cost flights to Alicante and Murcia airports also make this almost a weekend destination for the U.K. visitor or homeowner.”

About 17,000 Britons now have residence in Murcia, up from 1,000 a decade ago. A British school, Kings College Murcia, opened on the grounds of a golf resort this year.

While some people, like Browning, live here more or less full time, others find that cheap flights allow them to shuttle back and forth frequently from Northern Europe – or pop down for a weekend of golf.

Jens Strom, a businessman from Norway, was playing the nearly empty golf course at a resort called Alhambra.

“The courses are great,” he said. “Everybody who plays golf in Europe knows about this area now.”

Norwegian, Scandinavia’s largest low-cost airline, flies to Murcia from Bergen, Oslo, Stavanger and Trondheim, with prices starting at about euro 100.

Two years ago, Steve Forber, who owns a company outside Liverpool that sells and installs equipment for people with disabilities, was looking for a vacation home in southern Spain. His daughter, Rachel, had died after a long and public battle with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease several years earlier.

But with new cheap flights, he realized he could live in both countries. He now owns branches of Wheelie Free Mobility in both England and Playa Flamenca, Spain, flying back and forth every two to three weeks on Ryanair from Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport to Murcia.

“I fly more than most pilots.” he said. “Quite a few people commute this way. Cheap flights make it possible.”

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.