TRAVEL WITHOUT WINGS

DANISH LARGEST NEWSPAPER INTRODUCES NEW “TRAVEL WITHOUT WINGS” CONCEPT FOR TRAVEL SECTION

Things are really moving forward. It is possible to influence the medias. “Politiken” is in the middle of the party political picture.

EDITORIAL in Politiken Travel, Sunday d. 6.1. 2019 by Tina Krongaard, travel editor.

Welcome to a new and more climate-friendly Travel Section

Dear reader. Within the past few years, it has become clear that the climate is one of the world’s greatest challenges. We cannot close our eyes in Travel.

Therefore, in recent months we have been working on a new section that takes the climate challenge seriously and provides inspiring and critical travel journalism to Politiken’s climate-conscious readers.

I am happy to welcome you to the new Politiken Travel. From today, all travel reports in the section will be equipped with a climate print.

We have chosen to focus on transport to and from the destination, as it is the transport that contributes with the greatest climate impact.

Next to each reportage you can see how big a climate impact a similar journey will leave with either train / bus, car or airplane within Europe.

If you are traveling overseas, it doesn’t make sense to count on trains, buses or cars. Here, we will only show climate impact for the flight, but also indicate how many kilometers one will be able to drive by car for the same climate impression.

And, in spite of overseas travel, it is those who are the most stressful of the climate. Therefore, we hereby make a promise: In future, all ordinary travel sections will contain a maximum of one overseas travel report (except for special themes). Instead, we increase significantly for reports from close destinations. We will write more about experiences in Europe, and especially Northern Europe, the Nordic countries and Denmark will fill the pages to inspire travel experiences that do not have to be a major burden on the environment.

For the same reason, we will write more about traveling by train. Both as inspiration in the form of reports from places you can access by train, but also guides on how to easily and cheaply get around with less environmentally harmful modes of transport.

Travel without wings

We have also prepared a guide on how to compensate for climate change. The guide (this week, pages 12-13) will be hosted on politiken.dk/rejser and will be regularly adjusted. Here you will also find a new interactive graphic where you can calculate your flight’s climate impact.

In order for you to always find a climate-friendly journey in the section, we introduce a new format “Travel without wings” (page 4-8 this week), so that every week there is inspiration for a journey that you can make without flying.

On the whole, we will cover in more detail “green modes of transport” and in this way shout to politicians across Europe so that we can improve the possibilities for Danish and European travelers.

But more environmentally friendly travel is not just about journalism, it is also about knowledge and research. Therefore, we have invited a number of researchers to write in the section once per month to give us and the readers knowledge about how it goes with the development of more sustainable aviation fuel, cruise liners, or how to develop sustainable tourism and avoid excessive tourism.

This week, Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt, tourism researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, the phenomenon of “staycation” (page 15). To travel ‘after all, it’s about having a holiday and enjoying the empty and unoccupied days, not that the greenest grass can only be found at the end of an Airbus A320’s runway’, which Bodil writes.

We hope you will like the new Travel. Good reading and traveling enthusiasm.