Now travelling is more popular than ever in China. And the eco-friendly and sustainable traveling pattern has been adopted by an increasing number of people.

Now there are people they travel by eco-friendly transportation, they don't gorge during a trip, and they pay every little attention to what they do to the local environment. Gu Jian, an IT designer working in Shanghai, is such a person. He started an MSN group called the Lohas Tribe, and on the weekends, he calls on his tribe members to get closer to the nature.

"We don't usually travel very far. Long trips usually exhaust people and may affect our work. We usually choose some places nearby by riding bicycles to the suburbs. We bring food along the way to eat, and we always collect the trash and put it in the right places without polluting the local village. We try our best not to drive, or drive less to reduce the CO2 emissions."

Gu Jian also calls this kind of travel Ecotourism. It actually emerged from the environmental movement of the late 1970s in the western countries.

According to a report by Travel Weekly, a US business Travel Magazine, by the early 1990s, it was the fastest growing sector of the tourism industry, expanding globally between 20 and 34 percent per year. In 2004, ecotourism and nature tourism were growing three times faster than the global tourism industry as a whole. By the year of 2012, sustainable tourism could grow to 25 percent of the world's travel market, taking the value of the sector to approximately 473 billion US dollars a year.

The idea of traveling more greenly in China has just started. Li Ying, a journalist from the magazine National Geographic's Traveler says ecotourism is the trend among today's travelers.

"For example, one option would come up when we book air ticket online; Do you want to buy carbon that you will consume during this trip? The system will give a price for you by putting the length of the trip and the weight of your luggage into calculation. You can choose to pay for the carbon that you will use during this trip."

Carbon dioxide produced from flights, road trips, and other fossil-fuel based recreation is polluting the planet. Air transportation alone is believed to produce between 4 to 10 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide. Currently, a range of businesses are taking responsibility for reducing their "carbon footprint" by decreasing emissions and donating to tree planting and renewable energy projects. By just donating several dollars more when buying air tickets, customers can help some environmentally friendly projects such as forest protection. Besides airline companies, Li Ying says many hotels in the world are approaching the model of eco-friendly business.

"There is also such a hotel in Beijing. During the summer, the air conditioners would produce enough cool air to make some ice inside the stock room of the building. But at night, the cool air you breathe in the room is sent off by the ice that produced during the day time."

Riding a bicycle to the suburbs, buying carbon online when purchasing air tickets or choosing environmentally friendly hotels are becoming many travelers' choices. Just like what Gu Jian said, traveling is actually a kind of behavior producing pollution to the planet inevitably. Now it's the time to make it green.

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