This New App Will Track the Carbon Footprint of Your Flights

Many of us have started to be conscientious of our carbon footprints and one of the individual actions that can have the biggest impact on that metric is air travel. Other than traveling by other means, you can offset carbon emissions in some other way.

Flying contributes to climate change; flights account for around 2.5% of global carbon dioxide production at the moment. Planes fly high in the atmosphere, so the greenhouse gases they emit do more damage than when grounded.

A travel app by TripIt will help you understand not only what impact your vacation might be having on the environment, but also what you can do to offset that impact.

To make sure that you are doing your bit to save the environment, TripIt's Carbon Footprint offers a new feature that shows travelers the carbon emissions for their flights, tracks annual flight emissions, and suggests practical ways to reduce flight emissions.

This is the first travel organizing app to automatically aggregate flight emissions across providers, giving travelers a holistic view of their air travel footprint. The feature will be available to both free and Pro TripIt users.

The difficulty comes when determining how much to offset, and how. Fortunately, TripIt aims to demystify this question by showing travelers their flight's carbon footprint and offering suggestions for offsetting it.

You can easily see, track, and offset your carbon footprint through the Carbon Footprint feature. To identify your emissions for a single flight, click the detail screen for your flight and you will see the Carbon Footprint section at the bottom of the page.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is the same methodology used by American and European government agencies to calculate your carbon footprint while considering factors like distance, flight class, and environmental elements.

To offset your carbon footprint, the Gold Standard vet recommends high-quality carbon offset projects to which you can donate.

Many of us are not willing or able to significantly reduce our carbon emissions by flying significantly less, so you can purchase carbon offsets. Keep in mind that some carbon offsets are better than others.

Individual flights and total annual carbon footprint are tracked in the app.

In the app, you can view emissions per flight, as well as see a cumulative total for all your travel for the year.

To view the cumulative carbon emissions for all your flights in a certain year, check out your Travel Stats in the More tab, then tap on Carbon Footprint for more info and ideas on how to reduce your footprint.

According to GGP, it offers the world's most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standards.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) comprises 65% of global greenhouse emissions. These regulate the earth's temperature. When excess greenhouse gas exists in the atmosphere due to human activities, heat becomes trapped and the planet warms up.

Carbon offsetting does not get rid of the carbon dioxide produced when you fly but what it tries to make up for your share of the CO2. The carbon dioxide gets released by reducing it somewhere else instead, which will slowly help to reduce the global rise in carbon dioxide levels.