An anonymous Swedish Instagram account created in December has been shaming social media profiles and influencers for promoting trips to far-flung destinations, racking up more than 60,000 followers.
“I’m certainly affected by my surroundings and flygskam has affected how I view flying,” Viktoria Hellstrom, a political science student in Stockholm, said.
Last summer, she took the train to Italy, even though the friends she was meeting there went by plane, as that would have been her second flight within a few weeks. “The only way I could justify going there was if I took the train,” she said.
Train bookings up
The Scandinavian country’s location far north — it is 4,000km from the northern-most town of Kiruna to France’s Côte d’Azur — as well as its robust standard of living, the popularity of charter trips and the rise of low-cost airlines have all contributed to making Swedes big flyers.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in 2019 found that Swedes’ per capita emissions from flying between 1990 and 2017 were five times the global average. Emissions from Swedes’ international air travel have soared 61% since 1990, their study said.
Swedes’ concerns rely on solid data: the Swedish Meteorological Institute said last week that the average annual temperature was rising twice as fast in the country as the global average. In March, the World Wildlife Foundation published a survey indicating that nearly one in five Swedes chose to travel by rail rather than by air to minimise their environmental impact.
The trend is most noticeable among women and young people, it said.
Meanwhile, a survey published in Sweden’s leading travel magazine Vagabond said 64% of those who travelled abroad less in 2018 did so because of climate reasons.
National rail operator SJ reported a 21% boost in business travel this winter, and the government has announced plans to re-introduce night trains to major European cities before the end of its mandate in 2022.
The number of domestic flight passengers was projected to be down by 3.2% in 2018, the transport authority said in its latest figures from September, though the number of passengers on international flights rose 4%.
So far, the flight-shame trend hasn’t had the same traction among Sweden’s neighbours, although Finland has spawned its own version of the expression, calling it lentohäpeä .
Is flight shame real?
Other parts of the developed world may not have a word that’s quite as catchy — making do with #flyingless or #StopFlying —but average CO2 emissions of 285g per air kilometre, compared with 158 for cars and 14 for trains, have given many pause.
Fausta Gabola, a French-Italian student in Paris, is no longer sure that she should take up an offer to study in Australia on a scholarship. “It’s my dream to go there,” she said. “I applied without thinking too much about it and now I have a dilemma. I would feel like a hypocrite if I went.”