Wanderlust on a warming planet: young adults’ journey towards climate-friendly vacation practices

This article explores possibilities and impediments for climate-friendly practice change in the vacation practices of Danish young adults. Going on vacation is often a highly carbon-intensive practice and has been described as notoriously hard to integrate with climate concerns—especially in the context of young adults. With a practice theoretical approach and based on interviews and focus groups with 36 Danish 18-29-year-olds, the article finds climate-friendly practice change to be scarce. Exploring potentials and impediments for further change, it identifies two distinct practices: vacationing and journeying. Both practice configurations pose challenges for climate-friendly practice change, but both practices are also performed in less carbon-intensive ways which indicates potential for wider climate-friendly practice change. Vacationing is characterized by notions of convenience and quality time with loved ones to rewind from busy everyday lives, relying on carbon-intensive infrastructures, and characterized by a perceived minimum of competences. Journeying, on the other hand, is configured by notions of adventure and formative experiences, by mobility infrastructures seen as local and cheap, and by a more explicit range of competences. In vacationing, the central impediment to climate-friendly practice change is the experienced need for relaxation, convenience, and sunny destinations, calling for more convenient surface transport to such destinations or reconfiguring everyday-life demands to enable less convenient vacations. For journeying, the main impediment is the association of adventure and formative experiences to distant locations. Furthering climate-friendly journeying requires connecting social norms of formative experiences with nearby destinations or rendering long-haul surface transport cheaper.