Where to travel for the least carbon, from 32 European cities

Every departure city, in January

The tool above answers one city at a time. This is all 32 at once, in both questions, for January — the month the warmth question bites hardest — with journeys of up to 15 hours each way. Each destination is the best answer available from that city — nowhere else is both better and lower-carbon.

Every other month and journey length is precomputed too — browse by departure city.

Where every number comes from

Nothing on this site is an estimate of an estimate. Each column above has one published source and one vintage, and both are stated here so a figure can be checked without taking our word for it.

A further 386 settlements clear the size and distance filters but do not yet have twelve months of climate data. They are excluded from every ranking rather than estimated, and are added as the data arrives. The full method, including what it does badly, is written out separately.

What the numbers say

Warm is not the same as pleasant

A mild Atlantic winter can be relentlessly grey; a colder inland month can be bright and dry. Ranking on temperature alone sends people somewhere wet, so every table here carries sunshine hours and rainfall next to the degrees, and the site answers warmest and sunniest as separate questions.

Why the curve has a cliff

Within Europe, buying a better month is cheap in carbon terms: the extra distance is small and often on rails. Then the mainland runs out. The next improvement available is across open water, reachable only by air, and the price jumps by an order of magnitude. The cliff is not a quirk of the model — it is the shape of the map.

Then there is where you sleep

A journey is only part of a trip's carbon, and on a rail trip it is usually the smaller part. The same UK Government factor set prices a hotel room by country, and across every frontier this site computes, 7 nights outweighs a rail journey 80% of the time, by a median of 2.4×. Take the train to Calais above — 4.5 kg — and 7 nights there adds 46.9 kg — 10.4× the journey itself. Fly to Maspalomas and it inverts: 740 kg to arrive, 49.0 kg to stay the week.

Which is the point of putting it here. If you take the train, where you sleep becomes the biggest number in the trip — so it is worth choosing.

DEFRA publishes hotel factors for 38 countries and no more, so Morocco, Greece, Poland and the Nordics have none. Where there is no factor the site says nothing rather than borrowing a neighbour's.

Start somewhere

• Amsterdam
• Barcelona
• Berlin
• Birmingham
• Bristol
• Brussels
• Cardiff
• Copenhagen
• Dublin
• Edinburgh
• Frankfurt
• Glasgow
• Leeds
• Lisbon
• Liverpool
• London
• Madrid
• Manchester
• Milan
• Munich
• Newcastle
• Nottingham
• Oslo
• Paris
• Prague
• Rome
• Sheffield
• Southampton
• Stockholm
• Vienna
• Warsaw
• Zurich

Questions

Use the data

Every figure here derives from published sources and the whole dataset is downloadable under CC BY 4.0. If you are writing about travel emissions or building something that needs them, take the data — attribution is all that is asked. The method is written out in full, including what it does badly.