Start your carbon journey with business travel
Successful businesses need to be mobile but being mobile can be a challenge in a carbon constrained world. Fortunately this is one area of an enterprise’s carbon footprint that often provides real improvement opportunities. Reducing the emissions associated with business travel can deliver significant cost savings and can also increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
The scale of the problem
In Australia transport is responsible for around 14% of overall national emissions.
The relative importance of business travel related emissions can vary widely between organisations in different industries and can often be a far larger contributor that the national figures suggest.
In organisations with signficant Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, such as an aluminimum producer, travel related emissions may be less than 1% of total emissions. On the other hand for a services business, travel related emissions can be as high as 75% of emissions or more.
The Greensense approach
As always with carbon management, the first task for an organisation is to set a baseline for current emissions, against which improvements can be measured. This isn’t always easy and may require a degree of estimation in areas where detailed data isn’t available.
The diagram below represents our approach to tackling work-related travel emissions. We’ve talked about each step in a little more detail below.
Step 1: Baseline travel emissions and patterns
- Identify data sources — these may be internal to the organisation or from third parties such as your travel agent
- Identify and understand travel patterns — knowing who travels, when they travel and why is crucial to providing alternative travel options
- Estimate emissions — generally this involves a number of factors such as fuel types used, distance traveled, travel type etc
- Follow international standards — follow international GHG Protocol and ISO 14064 standards to ensure emissions are estimated and reported in a consistent and transparent manner. It’s also important to ensure emissions from business travel can be incorporated into the organisation’s overall emissions inventory.
Step 2: Develop travel solutions and targets
- Identify and prioritise emission reduction options — this will include measures to help you travel less and travel more efficiently
- Set target levels — these should be set at an organisational level and cascaded down to departements, teams and even individuals
- Implement formal change management programme — attitudes of employees and even clients can provide barriers to change. If there is no incentive for behaviour to change the initiatives you introduce will most likely fail. Greensense will work with you to ensure your emissions reduction programme has the best possible chance of success — activities include staff engagement and education, securing executive level support and engagement with third parties such as travel agents.
Step 3: Adopt new travel practices
- Identify the best ways to implement new practices — this may be as a pilot programme to help identify any unforeseen consequences of change to business process
- Monitor progress against target
- Establish ongoing emissions reporting — carbon emission management is not an one-off exercise but a one of continuous improvement
Step 4: Optmise — ongoing travel reduction
- Keep your eye on the ball — as businesses grow and transform, so will carbon emissions profile. It’s important to keep monitoring emissions data and modifying reduction strategies accordingly
- Move towards a more strategic approach — whilst to start with organisations may simply look at alternatives modes of travel, a more strategic goal only becomes attainable once organisations start looking at alternatives to travel
Finally, be pragmatic
Changing an organisations culture and processes is never easy. The key is to focus on what can be done, not on what can’t. Even small steps towards addressing your organisation’s work-related travel emissions are worthwhile and can often provide the justification and motivation for further effort.
For many organisations useful data is already available and work-related travel can be an excellent place to start the change process.
To find out how Greensense can help your organisation address it’s travel emissions please contact us at info@greensense.com.au.
Tags: carbon management, travel
