Could you pledge not to fly on a plane for a whole year?

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Three years ago, Londoner, Valerie Brown stopped flying on planes, so she can't see her daughter and grandsons in Los Angeles again.

The activist says she made the decision because of the environmental impact of the aviation sector.

She says that unless a machine is developed that takes all the carbon out of the air and reverses the damage, she cannot fly.

I believe we have to sacrifice a lot to give the young a future.

Ms Brown is dependent on her daughter and her granddaughters visiting the UK because of her stand. She hadn't seen them in three years before last summer.

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A number of studies have tried to show how much each passenger contributes to the melting of the sea ice.

A growing number of people, like Ms Brown, are giving up flying because of this data and concern.

In January 2020, we began offsetting the carbon emissions on all our flights within the UK so our customers fly carbon neutral.

Anna Hughes stopped flying due to her environmental concerns.

She has only been to the UK and mainland Europe once. He explored 1,000 miles of the British coast.

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Ms Hughes, who lives in London, says that that was an incredible adventure and showed you don't need to go very far to have an adventure of a lifetime.

She is the founder and director of a campaign called Flight Free UK, which encourages people to go without air travel for a year or more. Almost 4,000 people have committed so far this year.

Ms Hughes says that flying is the most carbon intensive activity you can do as an individual.

Signing up to the pledge is about taking action to help solve the climate crisis and acknowledging everything about our lifestyles has to change.

Ms Hughes says that she is realistic that some people may need to fly, such as to visit relatives abroad.

If you are taking eight flights a year, reduce it to two. It would feed into long-term behavioural change.

Chris Goater is the head of corporate communications at the International Air Transport Association.

The world is so globalised that you can see how the Pandemic affected families who were apart. As an industry, we have set out a plan to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement target of not exceeding 1.5 degrees global warming.

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He says that aviation is around 2.3% and that we want to get that to net zero by the year 2050. The reason that it is net zero, rather than zero, is that hydrogen and electric planes are not going to replace jet fuel in the foreseeable future.

The development of sustainable aviation fuels, which can be made from maize, algae and waste food oils, is the key tool to help the industry reach its net zero ambitions.

Incentives for producers of SAFs to produce more will bring the cost down closer to jet fuel, he says. SAFs are blended with aviation fuel at a ratio of up to 50%, and are not used on their own.

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Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution.

He says you can run planes on processed waste veggie oil, but there isn't nearly enough.

Dr Kalmus stopped flying in 2012 because of carbon offsetting.

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Climate scientists don't speak with one voice when it comes to the aviation sector.

Piers Forster is a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Leeds.

He says it is a bad idea to stop flying in a global society.

While Prof Foster sees airlines as a necessity, Ms Brown is determined to not fly.