Avoid, shift, improve: How to lower your carbon footprint by cycling

E-biking or cycling can help tackle climate change, one pedal at a time

Encouraging kids to cycle to school keeps them healthy and active and it's an environmentally-friendly mode of transport. Photo by Dermot Sullivan

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a major and urgent societal objective. Here in Ireland, we have to go further than just ‘reduce’ as we have to halve our emissions in eight years. This will change how we live in many ways. If you think this is unfair and unreasonable, so is your house burning down in a forest fire, or learning that your granny died in her sleep because it was 23˚C at 2am. Or to put it in a more directly Irish context, having your home or business destroyed by flooding.

Climate action will also change our travel behaviours. Earlier this year, researchers from the MaREI Centre at University College Cork published a paper analysing Irish travel patterns. Work is the primary reason for travelling, followed by shopping. Could more of these trips be made by bike to lower our emissions? In such discussions, whether in the media or amongst the general public, inevitably, someone makes the point they could never cycle to work because it’s 90km from their home. While this is often true, the MaREI Centre has calculated journeys under 8km are responsible for around 40% of all passenger transport emissions in Ireland. Vera O’Riordan, PhD student at the MaREI Centre, co-authored the report. She says short trips “are great candidates for switching to bikes or e-bikes.”