Two years (2024 vs. 2025), one around-the-world expedition — and what the CO₂e data reveals when slow travel meets reality
Table of Contents
1. Climate Neutral Travel Around The World Without Flying
Climate-neutral travel is often described as the idea that the emissions caused by a journey can be balanced out, typically through offsetting. In practice, this means first estimating the greenhouse gas emissions generated by transport, food, and accommodation, and then compensating for them through projects that reduce or remove emissions elsewhere.
Scientifically, this concept comes with important limitations. Emissions from travel are immediate and certain, while offsets are often delayed, model-based, and depend on assumptions about permanence and additionality. A tonne of CO₂e emitted today is not always equivalent to a tonne reduced or absorbed somewhere else over years or decades.
Because of this, climate-neutral travel is less about “zero impact” in a strict sense and more about responsibility and transparency. The most effective way to reduce impact remains avoiding high-emission activities in the first place — especially flying and meat consumption — and favoring slower, lower-intensity forms of movement and consumption. Offsetting can play a role, but only as a secondary step after reduction.
In addition to financial compensation, I am also working toward a more direct, physical form of impact: acquiring degraded land and supporting its regeneration into functioning ecosystems again. The idea is to move beyond abstract compensation and contribute to measurable, long-term ecological recovery on the ground.
In that sense, climate-neutral travel is not a fixed state you achieve, but an ongoing process: measuring, reducing where possible, and being honest about what remains — while actively contributing to solutions beyond the journey itself.
2. Two Very Different Years on the Same Journey
Both 2024 and 2025 were part of the same Zero Impact Expedition: traveling around the world without flying while measuring the carbon footprint of that decision. And the journey is ongoing in 2026!
Yet when you look at the data, the two years could hardly be more different.
- 2024 was slow, Europe-centered (from Estonia to Gran Canaria), and structurally and systemically simple.
- 2025 was fully transcontinental (from Antarctica to Alaska), chaotic, logistically extreme, and required constant adaptation.
Same person. Same principles.
Very different contexts.
3. Travel distance vs. Emissions: When Scale Changes Everything
The most obvious difference between the two years is scale.
2024
- Distance traveled: 11,000 km
- Total emissions: 4 t. CO₂e
2025
- Distance traveled: 47,000 km
- Total emissions: 9.5 t CO₂e
In other words, more than four times the distance resulted in less than double the emissions.
Not flying is only one part of the equation. Aviation is among the most carbon-intensive modes of transport, often emitting around 150–250 grams of CO₂ per passenger-kilometer on long-haul routes. Avoiding flights therefore removes one of the biggest single contributors to a travel footprint. But what replaces it matters just as much.
The pace of travel, food choices, accommodation, and access to (sustainable) local infrastructure all shape the overall impact. Emissions don’t just come from moving between places, but from how you live in them.
Traveling slowly tends to shift emissions away from short, high-intensity peaks toward longer, lower-intensity patterns. Fast travel often compresses high-emission activities into short periods, while slower travel spreads energy use over time and can reduce reliance on resource-intensive systems.
In 2024, long stays in off-grid volunteer communities, combined with freegan food systems and minimal use of infrastructure, kept emissions relatively low. Living in places with limited energy demand and eating food that would otherwise be wasted significantly reduces indirect emissions from production, transport, and storage.
In 2025, my carbon footprint doubled. More stays in shared apartments, limited food options, a road trip toward the end with a friend from the US over Canada to Alaska, and constant movement over four times the distance as in 2024 resulted in higher emissions.
Distance alone does not determine impact. Studies on carbon footprints show that lifestyle factors — especially diet – can outweigh transport in some cases. How we move, how fast we move, what we eat, and how we live in between movements all matter.
So maybe reducing emissions is less about a single decision and more about the combination of many smaller ones, repeated every day.
4. Mobility: From Slow Travel in Europe to Transamerican Reality
Mobility is where the largest difference appears.
- 2024 mobility emissions: 412 kg CO₂e
- 2025 mobility emissions: 3,003 kg CO₂e
In 2024, movement happened almost exclusively by bus, train, hiking, and sailing on 10,000km (2025 = 47,000km). There was no private car use and no flying.
In 2025, the expedition expanded across an entire continent — the Americas — including:
- Over 10,000 km of hitchhiking
- Use of night buses across Central and South America
- Shared vehicles for 6 weeks living out of the car.
- A sailed Atlantic crossing almost without motoring
- One “unavoidable” flight at the end of the year
Scale and geography inevitably increased emissions but considering the distance covered still relatively low, however I still feel I could improve here in the year 2026. That one flight stings like a bee 😀
5. Living, Eating, Sleeping: Carbon Footprint of A Traveler
Accommodation emissions almost doubled:
- 2024: 1.4 t CO₂e
- 2025: 2.7 t CO₂e
2025 relied heavily on:
- Wild camping (around 3 months)
- Couchsurfing
- Night buses replacing accommodation
- Off-grid living (especially in Alaska)
Food emissions, as well almost doubled
- 2024: 1.2 t CO₂e
- 2025: 2.6 t CO₂e
In 2024, freegan living kept food emissions relatively low.
In 2025, food availability was shaped by different set-ups. Diets varied mostly between vegetarian and meat-reduced over the year, with a period of hunting in the Amazon, a short fasting phase (no food for 7 days), and occasional vegan periods. Still, calculations were based on a conservative average scenario, best described as a mix of vegetarian and meat-reduced diets.
6. Climate Neutral Travel? What Two Years tell us
- Taken together, 2024 and 2025 tell a story that neither year could tell alone.
- 2024 demonstrates that extremely low annual carbon footprints are possible with slow travel by hiking, sailing, public transport, long stays volunteering in off-grid sustainable communities (solar energy), and local dumpster diving and meat-reduced local food choices
- 2025 demonstrates that even extreme, long-distance transcontinental travel without flying can remain within a carbon range that many stationary lifestyles exceed — but also where individual effort meets systemic limits.
One unavoidable flight in 2025 outweighed months of careful choices. Not because the concept failed — but because infrastructure, borders, and policy still dominate the equation.
