 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
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