In Europe, business travelers comprise about 12 percent of total passengers but are responsible for 30 percent of emissions. And yet, there is a desire among corporate travelers to lessen their impact on the environment. According to a survey conducted by Wakefield Research and SAP Concur, 24 percent of respondents would decline a business trip if it required using non-sustainable travel options, and nearly all business travelers (94 percent) are looking to take steps to ensure greener travel over the next 12 months. Despite this trend, just 37 percent of businesses listed carbon compensation as a key objective for their sustainability agenda in 2022.
What’s getting in the way of more business travelers taking action to reduce their carbon impact? There’s too much friction: it’s difficult to calculate and understand emissions data, the voluntary carbon market is complicated, and the user experience for understanding emissions and offsetting them can be poor. We must overcome these obstacles if we are to move the industry forward in this area.
The question for corporate travelers and travel managers is this: What specific processes must businesses have in place to see a reduction in their travel emissions?
Tools and Transparency
You cannot manage what you do not measure. Industry leaders from the travel, corporate, and booking sectors must invest in the right tools so businesses can easily understand the carbon impact associated with their travel decisions. The only way to advance more sustainable business travel is to provide travel managers with easy access to accurate high-precision emissions data so they can set and track carbon goals over time. This understanding provides the foundation needed for building good travel policies and incentivizing more carbon-efficient behavior.
It can be incredibly time-consuming and manual to calculate the carbon associated with travel, which is why businesses need the right technology to automate the process. An automated system is significantly faster, easier and less prone to human error than a manual one. With these tools, the travel industry can make it simpler for individuals and businesses to understand the complexities behind the carbon emissions associated with activities and to make carbon-informed travel decisions. But even a dominant central player in the corporate travel industry can’t enable this alone.
Effectively addressing corporate carbon emissions requires thoughtfulness, transparency, and a clear climate strategy.
Increasing Resources through Partnerships
Business travel is complicated, involving many different stakeholders and organizations. Therefore, it is very difficult for one stakeholder to decarbonize without support from others. For example, a corporation will have difficulty reducing the carbon impact of its business travel without visibility into the booking data associated with that travel. For many companies, this data resides within the databases of travel booking tools or travel management companies, such as SAP Concur, Amex GBT or other travel partners. These types of travel companies have deep expertise, but their core business is not calculating carbon emissions and managing the associated complexities. This is where a partnership between carbon data experts, travel booking experts and corporates looking to manage their business travel emissions becomes powerful.
Managing Emissions with Integrity
Once businesses have the right tools and a clear understanding of their carbon emissions, the next step is determining the optimal way to manage them.
The primary goal of an organization or an individual should be to directly reduce the carbon emissions associated with its operational or day-to-day activities. However, in the short-term most organizations and individuals will still have a carbon footprint.
Supporting sustainable aviation fuels provides an opportunity for corporations to “inset”—to reduce carbon emissions from within their own value chain. In the travel industry at large, supporting SAF as an alternative to traditional jet fuel is critical to decarbonizing aviation in the short and medium term.
Carbon offsetting can also address unavoidable emissions by supporting initiatives that reduce or remove carbon elsewhere in the world (through nature-based solutions, community-focused projects and beyond). By purchasing verified offsets, buyers provide critical financial support to certified projects that have climate impact in addition to other benefits (supporting communities, protecting biodiversity, etc.).
Effectively addressing corporate carbon emissions requires thoughtfulness, transparency, and a clear climate strategy. There are many pieces to this: conducting appropriate project diligence, building processes and procedures that are practical for the organization and being mindful of the role that these actions play within the context of an organization’s broader climate and sustainability strategies.
Beyond Business Travel
Those actions can represent a considerable challenge for travel managers already. Managed travel players, by collaborating across the ecosystem, have the opportunity to simplify solutions to support that process, rather than leaving travel managers to piece together their options. In doing so, managed travel partners will do more than support individual clients. They also will drive change through the overall travel industry as corporate travelers—who clearly want to leverage sustainable solutions—reach for them when traveling on business but also will learn what is possible as they plan personal travel.
