​Do you ever find yourself feeling overwhelmed with deadlines, by a ‘to do list’ longer than your arm, or facing a problem that seems impenetrable?  The temptation is to get your head down and push through, but sometimes, the best thing to do is take a step back and take a walk. This may seem counterintuitive, but in fact, taking a walk can help and has numerous benefits especially if it’s connected to nature.
The benefits of walking for the body and brain
Any walk is good for brain health with each footstep increasing blood flow to the brain, helping your memory and cognitive function. If you can make it a brisk walk, it’ll boost your endorphin levels. These are the ‘feel-good’ hormones that improve your mood and lower stress, anxiety and depression.
During a walk you’ll experience different things to see, hear, smell and touch which can the stimulate the imagination. So getting away from the office can give you new perspectives and help with creative thinking.
The extra reward of nature
The benefits of walking (or indeed, cycling) are greater in the countryside where the sights and smells promote feelings of wellness. Being in or near the natural world is proven to reduce stress and improve wellbeing, whether you’re exercising or not. In fact it has been shown that simply having views of trees from a hospital window can boost patient recovery time.
Even in a town or city environment there are often urban parks, tree-lined avenues or canals to walk along. The complete change of pace and environment can help you look at your to do list or problem from a fresh angle.
If nothing else, getting in some steps and fresh air is helpful for your physical health. And you may also think about taking a walk with a colleague to chat over the issues away from the office where you can be more relaxed.

Based on our current trajectory we’re going to breach the 2°C threshold by 2037 (just 12 years from now) at a cost of $11 trillion of lost GDP, and 3°C by 2060 at a cost of $18 trillion. This can be considered the cost of Not Zero as this is what we can expect if we don’t act. And this is optimistic in that it ignores the impact of crossing climate tipping points and planetary boundaries. This gives an idea of how much it’s worth spending to reduce our carbon emissions.

Sources:
Comparing climate impacts at 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C and 4°C | UN Climate Summit News - COP29
Global Warming has Accelerated Significantly, Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf (2025 preprint)
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Original post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tony-duckenfield_climatechange-netzero-notzero-activity-7361330627352174592-7CYa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAEjLEIB1e5oumvzClP0uo5HJMONEXj7JOY

I recently came across this report: “The State of Climate Action in Business Travel Industry Barometer 2023” which confirmed what I had suspected but hadn’t seen in black and white before, that business travel can account for a large proportion of a company’s carbon emissions if it’s office based. In fact, this report states that businesses travel can account for 53% of a company's carbon emissions. This is for a consultancy business and at the other end of the spectrum, for a manufacturing company it may be just 12% so there is clearly a lot of variation between types of organisation.
To provide some context, the carbon emissions from one return flight to Madrid in Economy is around the same as a year’s worth of office emissions for one person, and one return flight to New York in Business Class emits 6 times the annual emissions associated with the office (heating, cooling, lighting, equipment).
Air travel is not the only source of carbon, car travel is the other big one (if it’s not an EV) and for a year’s worth of office emissions you can drive around 3,880 miles, so car travel emissions for business and commuting can easily exceed that for the office, given that the average car commute in the UK is around 4,800 miles a year.
This is just business travel though, commuting can add another 15%, and then there are also deliveries generating emissions from freight vehicles and “white vans”. So conceivably, transport could represent three-quarters of an organisation’s carbon footprint.
All in all then, for many organisations transport is the number one source of carbon emissions and so the top area for action to reduce emissions. This makes it even more important to collect data on transport, including the elephant in the room, business travel. This will enable effective actions to be identified and the effects of these assessed.
 
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/business-travel-elephant-room-tony-duckenfield-beyond-duckenfield-ggonc
 

The Predictably Human Survey was created to help expose some of the behavioural effects which affect our decision making. These effects are sometimes referred to as “cognitive biases” because they lead to decisions which are sub-optimal when considered in purely economic terms, and used as evidence that people behave irrationally.
The first survey question illustrates this point, respondents are asked if they would take a bet where, on the toss of a coin they could win £15 if they got heads, or loss £10 if they got tails. If people behaved perfectly rationally and wanted to maximise their income they would take the bet every time, since where you have an equal chance of winning £15 or losing £10 the expected value is +£2.50. However, because people are human, in the latest wave of the survey 54% took the bet. In other waves of the same survey it’s been as low as 21%, illustrating the important point that people vary and, more particularly, their circumstances vary. The reason is humans are affected by Loss Aversion which means we put greater value on losses than on gains.
The different treatment of losses and gains is explored further in the following questions:
Which would you choose?

• Winning a certain £500 or 50% chance of winning £1,000
• A certain loss of £500 or 50% chance of losing £1,000

If humans were entirely rational, the responses to these two questions would be the same, but as shown in the charts below they are very different.
 
Different treatment of losses v gains 
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​The Predictably Human survey (the full survey explores other biases such as short-termism, and relativity) demonstrates that people don’t make entirely rational choices, but that they are still reasonably predictable if you take into account the behavioural effects at work.