Swedish Air Travellers and Voluntary Carbon Offsets: Towards the Co-Creation of Environmental value?

There is now broad consensus that aviation is a significant contributor to global warming, and various mechanisms are currently discussed to reduce the sectors’ emissions of greenhouse gases. The European Union is likely to include aviation in its emission trading system by 2011, but globally no such system is discussed. One question is thus of whether voluntary carbon offsetting schemes can make a significant contribution to mitigating the contribution of aviation to climate change. These schemes have seen considerable growth in recent years, even though the overall amount of emissions offset is as negligible. Moreover, tour operators and airlines offering voluntary carbon offsets report that customers show limited interested in these schemes. In the light of this, the article seeks to discuss the implications of voluntary carbon offsetting schemes as a means of compensating emissions from aviation, and goes on to assess air travellers’ knowledge of and attitudes to these schemes. Structural problems that have to be overcome to create broader interest in voluntary carbon offsetting are discussed in the context of co-creation of environmental value at the level of economic transactions between individual passengers (consumers) and airlines (producers), based on a survey of Swedish air travellers.