For the moment, Brussels has accepted that flights between islands and connections between the Canary Islands and the rest of Spain will be exempt from the new CO2 emission payments until 2030, but not flights between the archipelago and third countries of the EU, much less those that connect the islands with their main tourist client, the United Kingdom.
For the first time, a report, prepared by the University of La Laguna, offers the emission figures for the planes that bring and take back home the international tourists who enjoy their vacations in the Canary Islands. They emit an average of 6.41 million tons of CO2 per year.
These 6.41 million tons of CO2 are not included in the emissions that the Canary Islands declares as its own (11.80 million in 2017), but they do allow a comparison to be established by the authors of this work, published in the journal "Sustainability" (2021): they are equivalent to 54.33% of all the islands' emissions.
As many emissions as all the power plants in the Canary Islands
If they were part of the figures that the Canary Islands recognizes as caused by its economy in its Energy Yearbook, they would only be surpassed by the emissions from power plants and industry, with 6.54 million tons per year, and would exceed all national transport by 23% (land, sea and air), which contributes 5.21 million. In fact, they multiply by 10 the emissions from national air transport generated by the Canary Islands.
The people in charge of this work calculated the emissions from international air transport originating or destined for the Canary Islands, taking as a reference the traffic of the five years prior to the covid-19 pandemic (2015-2019). That is, the same activity figures that tourism and aviation have just recovered in 2022 in the Canary Islands after the deep crisis in which covid plunged them.
The authors of the work recall that there is no archipelago in the world far from the continent that has a continuous flow of international tourists like the one in the Canary Islands, of around one million people per month, without major seasonal peaks.
The largest CO2 emitters on flights to the Canary Islands coincide with the islands' main clients: the United Kingdom, with 2.35 million tons per year (36.7% of those attributable to international air transport in the Canary Islands); Germany, with 1.43 million (22.3%); Sweden, with 319,805 tons (5.0%); Netherlands, with 267,007 (4.2%); Norway, with 252,142 (3.9%); Ireland, with 238,474 (3.7%); and Italy, with 224,540 (3.3%).
In the emissions per tourist, another variable comes into play, which changes the order: the distance from their country to the Canary Islands. The tourists who release the most CO2 into the atmosphere every time they fly to the Canary Islands were the Russians (who are prohibited from entering since the invasion of Ukraine), with 720 kilos per person (round trip), followed by the Finns, with 650 kilos, and the Swedes, with 600.
British and Germans, who account for half of the tourism in the Canary Islands, cause the same amount of emissions, 470 kilos per person.
480 kilos of average emissions per international passenger
The average CO2 emissions of a tourist round trip flight to the Canary Islands is 480 kilos per person, which means, this study highlights, that each tourist who flies to the Canary Islands emits only on that trip twice the CO2 that each European generates on average in all their air travel in a year (250 kilos).
Above this are, however, the emissions from tourist flights to Hawaii (590 kilos of CO2 per passenger from Los Angeles or from Tokyo and one ton from New York) or flights to other long-distance destinations, such as Bali or the Maldives, with more than 800 kilos per person in both cases. The tourist islands close to the European continent have lower emission levels, due to their geographical location: 310 kilos Malta and 260 kilos Balearic Islands.
Another way to examine the issue, according to the authors, is to analyze what is the relative weight of round trip flights to the Canary Islands in the total CO2 generated by the consumption of a European citizen in a year, a relative indicator, which depends in turn on the level of development and industrialization of the country.
The result is this: for a British person, flying to the Canary Islands accounts for 8.10% of their annual CO2 emissions; for a German, 5.36%; for a Swede, 13.64%; for a Norwegian, 7.18%; for a French, 9.57%; for an Irish, 5.70%; for a Dutch, 4.60%; for an Italian, 8.97%; and for a Swiss, 11.95%.
With these data and in a context of growing concern among European tourists about the carbon footprint of their trips, the authors emphasize the importance for the Canary Islands to persuade them with measures that demonstrate environmental commitment. And also the need for CO2 emission reduction measures to be "sensitive" to the "fragility" of economies "highly dependent on aviation", as is the case with the islands, where almost 100% of tourists arrive by air transport.
