March 23, 2022 POW Mobility Week: How You Get Outdoors Matters
Emissions from passenger transport are the main source of CO2 when it comes to outdoor sports. To tackle this, Protect Our Winters (POW) Europe launched a European Mobility Week.
The car is still the most popular mode of transport to access outdoor areas for sports and recreation. About 70% of emissions from outdoor recreation come from transport. For this reason, POW Europe launched a European wide POW Mobility Week (March 28 – April 3), engaging the outdoor community in finding creative and impactful ways to reduce its transport emissions. This week is focusing on being fun and raising awareness and will be followed-up by a policy-level campaign later this year.
During POW Mobility Week, businesses and individuals are encouraged to bring down their transport emissions to a minimum. Individual outdoor sport lovers are encouraged to transport sustainably throughout the entire week, tracking their movements through an app by our partners Active Giving and sharing their sustainable travel stories (#POWMobilityWeek) on social media. This will be accompanied by film screenings of POW’s athlete ambassadors, showing sustainable travel sports movies, and the chance to win prizes for the best sustainable travel stories and the most kilometers travelled sustainably.
Prizes include travel bags, ski tickets, snowboards, a POW merchandise pack and an e-bike to get moving sustainably. While the sign-up process for brands to take part is still open, some companies that already confirmed their participation are Picture Organic Clothing, Deuter, and Icebug, as well as Pyhä ski resort. These companies are engaging their employees and customers in creative ways, by running educational workshops on transport, showcasing different sustainable transport options, running employee competitions on the most sustainable travel to the office during the week, introducing job bikes and bike support schemes, and community breakfasts for employees who come by bike. Many of them are also involving their athletes to take part and share their own stories. At the end of the week, both outdoor sports lovers and businesses are intended to be able to make more informed decisions on their mobility behavior and better understand our transport emissions footprint.
Credit: Daniel Bear Photography
“Action for the climate should be fun”
“At POW we live by the belief that taking action for the climate should also be fun. Therefore, we are launching POW Mobility Week, one week of action to tackle the biggest contribution of outdoor sports activities to climate change: transportation,” says Sören Ronge, POW Europe coordinator.
“Changing our transport behavior on an individual level from plane to train or from car to bike can significantly help to reduce emissions. By encouraging people and companies to take part, tracking our travels and giving away some prizes, we connect something good for the planet with something fun while educating our community on this pressing issue.”
POW Mobility week is part of a wider mobility concept at POW Europe. Earlier this year, POW Europe launched a Sustainable Travel Hub, a website to raise awareness, provide solutions and push for the necessary policy changes. The hub is a work in progress and will grow through-out the year, providing information on easily accessible outdoor destinations, a carbon calculator and concrete information on how to travel more sustainably. Later this year, POW will complement this work with a policy level campaign to connect these individual level actions to systemic impact and calling for the necessary policies and regulations to be put in place to make sustainable transportation the new normal.
Under the slogan “Reframe your journey,” POW Europe is showing that taking the train or riding the bike to get to the trail can be fun and that the journey is actually part of the adventure. POW Europe will continue to unite outdoor resorts, transport operators and the wider outdoor community to reduce their transport-related carbon footprint and reflect on their travel behavior.
About POW Europe:
POW Europe helps passionate outdoor people protect the lifestyles and places they love from climate change. It is a community of athletes, scientists, creatives, and business leaders advancing non-partisan policies that protect the world today and for future generations.
POW Europe was formed in 2020 to leverage the power of its network of nine national POW chapters in Europe: Austria, Germany, France, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Italy and the UK… and counting. Its national chapters are strongly rooted in their communities and have their ear to the ground on national and local issues. POW Europe transforms those local strengths into cohesive and impactful Europe-wide climate action. At the same time, it amplifies national campaigns, provides centralized expert support to the network and a single, coordinated point of contact for European partners.
Through its national chapters, POW Europe reaches an expanding community of over 100,000 people with its digital channels – add to that more than 3,6 million by its 130+ athlete ambassadors – as well as potentially those 60+ million Europeans who consider themselves hikers, skiers, alpinists or the like, comprising the European Outdoor Community.
Lead Photo: Alexandre Chambet
