In today’s rapidly changing business environment, sustainability is no longer a buzzword but an essential part of corporate strategy.
Business travel plays a vital role in driving business growth, fostering corporate relationships, and seizing new opportunities. Recognizing its importance to the success of your organization, the approach to reducing your Scope 3 emissions is not to limit travel demand, but to optimize it through strategic and sustainable practices. By adopting more environmentally responsible choices, you can minimize your emissions while maintaining the essential momentum of your business operations.
For travel program managers and ESG professionals, reducing the carbon footprint of business travel is both a challenge and an opportunity. This blog outlines a simple five-step plan to help organizations minimize their business travel-related emissions.
5-Step Plan Overview
- Understand your impact: Assess the role of scope 3 emissions and travel.
- Leveraging technology and data: Increase the accuracy of data collection and track your efforts effectively.
- Optimize your travel policy: Evaluate and adjust policies to encourage sustainable travel choices.
- Employee Engagement: Educate and empower your employees to make environmentally friendly decisions.
- Choose the right TMC: Partner with TMC to support your sustainability goals.
1. Understand your influences
The first step to reducing your business travel emissions is to understand the impact of business travel within your business’ overall carbon footprint, specifically Scope 3 emissions. Business travel falls into Scope 3 emissions because it involves activities that your company does not own or directly control, but that do impact your company’s carbon footprint. This could include emissions from flights, hotel stays, rental cars, and other travel-related activities that employees perform on behalf of your company.
Measuring Scope 3 emissions can provide value to your business beyond reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It can help you identify energy efficiency and cost-saving opportunities, engage employees in your company’s sustainability journey, and strengthen relationships with customers, investors, and other stakeholders. It can also help you stay ahead of future regulatory and compliance requirements and differentiate yourself from your competitors.
2. Utilization of technology and data
Harnessing the power of technology and data is essential to improving the accuracy and efficiency of emissions tracking and reduction efforts. Implementing automated data collection systems, such as integrated travel management technology and corporate travel apps, ensures that all travel data is captured, reducing manual entry errors and data gaps. Travel reporting and data solutions can also collect additional details, such as travel type and distance traveled, which are critical to accurate emissions calculations.
Advanced data analytics plays a key role in moving from rough estimates to precise numbers. Detailed data segmentation allows for more precise emission factors to be applied, reflecting the specific characteristics of each journey. Machine learning algorithms analyze historical travel data and predict future travel patterns, helping to identify trends, peak travel periods, and potential areas for emissions reduction. A sophisticated proprietary fuel burn calculator developed by RDC Aviation combines real-time data with up-to-date emission factors to provide a comprehensive view of flight emissions. This level of detail allows business travelers to make informed decisions about their environmental impact when choosing which flights to take. By considering factors such as airline seat configuration, cabin class, and CO2 emissions per kilometer, businesses and travelers can optimize their travel choices to minimize their carbon footprint.
Regularly monitoring and reporting on the progress of your emissions reduction initiatives is essential for continuous improvement. Implementing a dashboard that provides insight into your business travel emissions and an automated reporting system that compiles and distributes reports on a regular basis will streamline this process. Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and using benchmarking tools to compare your performance to industry standards will help you identify areas for improvement and set realistic goals.
It is important to ensure that TMCs provide the right travel tools and expertise to inform strategic change and more informed choices, thereby supporting sustainability goals.
3. Optimize your travel policy
A well-crafted travel policy can make a significant contribution to reducing your carbon footprint, so it’s important to evaluate and adjust your policies to promote sustainable travel choices. There are a number of ways to do this. When considering sustainable travel suppliers, choose suppliers known for their commitment to sustainability and rely on your travel management company (TMC) for expertise in this area.
Set policy parameters based on travel class (economy, premium, business) to ensure alignment with your emissions reduction goals. Setting parameters helps travel bookers and travelers make the most sustainable choices to meet your company’s emissions reduction goals.
Where possible, prioritise rail travel over air travel, as it generally has a lower carbon footprint. For example, a rail journey from London to Edinburgh has 10 times less carbon emissions than a car and 13 times less than a plane, according to calculations made as part of the 'Green Travel Pact' led by the Rail Delivery Group. There are also opportunities to encourage the use of electric vehicles if you need to hire a car to minimise emissions.
4. Employee Participation and Training
There has never been a better time to promote sustainable travel behaviors. We know that business travel is essential to the growth of our organization, so educating employees about our company’s sustainability goals will be key to reducing emissions through more sustainable travel choices.
Fostering a culture that prioritizes sustainability can influence employees to adopt practices that reduce their individual and collective carbon footprints. Employees play a critical role in achieving sustainability goals. It is essential to empower and educate them to make more sustainable travel choices using intuitive tools and resources.
To support this, work with your TMC to schedule regular updates and training sessions. These sessions can focus on how travel technology and tools can help you achieve your sustainability goals, ensuring your staff is aware of the options available to them. They can also include travel supplier-focused updates, such as a hotel’s new sustainability initiatives or an airline’s adoption of SAF.
By fostering a culture of sustainability and providing employees with the right knowledge and resources, you can make significant progress toward achieving your organization’s environmental goals.
5. Choose the right travel management company
Working with a TMC that aligns with your sustainability goals can make a significant difference in your efforts to reduce travel emissions. Here are some tips on what to look for:
- Sustainable Solutions and Service Capabilities: The right TMC will provide innovative solutions tailored to your unique needs and sustainability goals. This may include technologies that encourage sustainable booking behaviors, reporting that accurately represents sustainability performance and identifies opportunities for improvement, and supplier contracts that align with your sustainability goals and values.
- Agnostic technology: Look for a TMC that leverages technology that integrates with a variety of systems to provide accurate data and reporting.
- Market Agility: TMCs that can quickly adapt to market changes can better support achieving short- and long-term sustainability goals.
- Investment Return: Evaluate the performance of your travel program by considering the environmental benefits you can achieve by working with TMC, an expert in sustainability.
It's time to do something about reducing our carbon footprint.
By adopting this five-step plan, travel program managers and ESG professionals can make significant progress in reducing the carbon emissions associated with business travel.
Contact CTM today to learn how we can help you develop and implement a customized sustainable travel program that meets your organization’s unique needs. Together, we can drive meaningful change toward a sustainable future.