The financial crisis pushed green issues off the agenda, but has the recent economic upturn seen a renewed interest in sustainable travel?
According to the Forestry Commission your average tree ‘locks up’ about 2kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year. If you add up all the trees in all the UK’s forests and woodlands (and someone at the Commission clearly had nothing much else to do that day), between them they suck about 10 million metric tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year.
However, the UK’s total CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions amount to something like 600 million metric tonnes per year. Clearly, we need more trees...Sustainability, and sustainable travel in particular, are back on the agenda. In 2009, as the developed world finally woke up to the true extent of its economic woes, corporate interest in ‘green’ issues nose dived. Companies were too concerned about their own survival to worry about that of the rainforests and polar bears.
Five years on, with many major economies back on track, the panic has subsided, and travel’s environmentalists are once again being given a fair hearing – but are they getting their message across?
A recent survey by the Guild of Travel Management Companies (GTMC) of more than 1,000 regular business rail travellers revealed that “the company car has taken a back seat due to higher petrol prices, congestion, and not being able to work whilst travelling”.
However, in general GTMC members’ car rental transactions are growing at a faster rate than that of rail – in the first nine months of last year, the former were 9.3 per cent up on the same period in 2012, while the latter were up only 4.1 per cent.
Stepping off the gas
So, mixed messages – but what’s not obvious is to what extent people are aware of the differentials in CO2 emissions. For example, Eurostar says that on its London-Paris round-trips, its CO2 emissions work out at 6.6kg per passenger, against 102.8kg for a return flight between Luton and Paris Charles de Gaulle. Comparative figures for London-Brussels are 8.2kg by rail and 140.6kg by air.
But what does a kilo of CO2 look like? The answer is that at normal atmospheric pressure, it’s about half a cubic metre. An Olympic-sized swimming pool has a minimum capacity of around 2,500 cubic metres, so it would hold 5,000kg of CO2, equivalent to nearly 760 Eurostar trips to Paris and back, but fewer than 50 return flights.
Quite what this means in terms of the environment – apart from “not good” – remains unclear but, if Airplus International’s latest report is to be believed, the price of ignoring travel emissions is going to be very high indeed.
Its white paper, Business Travel 2060, paints an apocalyptic picture of a future in which nations go to war over water supplies; rising sea levels swamp roads and railways; and wildfires, extreme storms and higher winds could close ports and airports.
“The environmental impact of pollution and emissions currently costs the global economy around US$4.7 trillion each year,” writes the report’s author, Mark Harris. “With the world’s fast-growing population, and rising incomes in emerging economies, demand for natural resources is on track to treble by 2050 – meaning that water and other critical raw materials for industry will be less available, and more expensive.”
Virtual solutions
Not everyone subscribes to the doom-and-gloom scenario, however. Indeed, Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) thinks future generations of travellers are likely to be more attuned to sustainable ways of working, and to virtual meetings in particular. “Virtual meetings will always be an option for those companies that have invested in the technology and whose business practice can be handled via remote connections,” says Sandy Moring, CWT senior director for market strategy, business services and sustainability.
She says future business generations could potentially embrace virtual meetings more as it is part of their mindset, whereas at the moment “we’re in a crossover zone where we have long-established travellers in senior positions who still value highly the more traditional approach to doing business. The next generation coming through, with a completely different attitude and approach, could potentially be game-changing.”
As companies and their employees become greener, Moring argues, so they will increasingly expect their suppliers to have followed suit. She says economic restraints mean that a travel management company’s (TMC) sustainability performance is “not yet a deal-breaker”, but as peer pressure and legislation initiates better performance on the sustainability agenda, more and more companies are committing to a strategy of best practice.
“When companies are able to engage and support each other’s strategies, then you are definitely coming nearer to being in a deal-making position,” she says.
If legislative and peer pressure does force more corporates to toe the eco-friendly line, is there an advisory role for TMCs? Moring believes there is, and that CWT – which recently became the first TMC in the world to achieve Gold Medal status under the Global Business Travel Association’s (GBTA) Project Icarus corporate social responsibility scheme – is leading by example. “We are proactively advocating sustainable travel practices and using our knowledge and position to provide consultancy services on how corporates can meet their own targets via collaboration,” she says.
Eco-investment
Moring and CWT are not alone. A recent GBTA case study, written by Project Icarus’s head of sustainability, Bernard Harrop, pays tribute to the efforts of another Gold Medal recipient, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC): “PWC has invested much time and effort in developing its programme, and the rewards are very clear to see in terms of environmental impact (CO2 reductions), improved employee satisfaction and substantial cost avoidance.”
Mark Avery, PWC’s head of business services, adds: “The travel team at PWC have worked hard to support the firm’s global sustainability initiatives. We are particularly proud of the communication programme and the commitment of our travellers. We aim to develop new initiatives as we continue to improve our drive for greater sustainability.”
Widely recognised as a sustainable travel leader, PWC continues to fine-tune its best-in-class programme. “Business travel remains our single largest generator of carbon emissions, representing 53 per cent of our carbon footprint in 2013,” a spokesman for the company says. “Air travel accounts for most of this, making it a top sustainability priority. Business travel is a necessary part of the way we work – our ability to serve our clients largely depends on being able to visit their locations. Nevertheless, we continue to challenge ourselves on the need, frequency and mode of travel.
Last year alone, PWC trained more than 2,000 employees in the use of online meetings technology, and invested more than £460,000 in its online and videoconferencing infrastructure. Harrop calculates that in the three years between 2009 and 2012, PWC’s sustainability drive has resulted in cost avoidance to the tune of Ä7 million.
The PWC programme is incredibly detailed, right down to asking travellers to “avoid individually-packaged condiments”. It may seem pedantic but, as one supermarket chain insists on telling us, every little helps.
Paper waste
Which brings us back to the trees. According to the howstuffworks.com website, most paper is made from pine trees, which are felled when they are about 30 years old and have reached a height of around 60 feet. Such a tree yields something over 80,000 cubic inches of wood, weighing about 1,600lbs. The resulting pulp yields about 800lbs of paper – the approximate equivalent of 200 reams of A4.
So never mind the individual salt and pepper sachets – just stay away from the photocopier...and don’t forget to subscribe to BBT’s digital edition!
Environmental activist group Greenpeace has called on the government to ban all UK mainland domestic flights and scrap its plans for airport expansion to force travellers to use greener rail services.
“We don’t want to stop people from flying,” the organisation insists. “We do want to prevent the number of flights from growing to dangerous levels – the growth in aviation is ruining our chances of stopping dangerous climate change.
“To achieve this, companies like British Airways need to end their needless short-haul routes, and the government needs to ban all mainland domestic routes, where the train is an easy alternative. Most importantly, the government must end plans for airport expansion.”
As usual, hard facts are hard to come by. According to the Environmental Transport Association (ETA), just one return flight from London to New York produces a greater carbon footprint than a whole year’s personal allowance needed to keep the climate safe.
“The average personal footprint in Britain is 9.5 tonnes,” the association says. “To get down to a ‘fair’ share of the world’s total, this must be cut by 87 per cent, leaving 1.2 tonnes. On every flight to New York and back, each traveller emits about 1.2 tonnes of CO2. If we fly, air travel overshadows all our other impacts.”
On the opposing side, the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG) says that aviation emissions, although increasing rapidly, represent only 2 per cent of the global total. In 2012, ATAG says, human-induced CO2 emissions added up to 34 billion tonnes, only 680 million tones of which came from aviation.
Furthermore, it says, aviation accounts for only 12 per cent of the emissions produced by all transport modes, with road transport accounting for 74 per cent of the total.
Business travellers themselves seem ambivalent on the subject – an Audiencenet survey conducted for the GTMC revealed that more than 80 per cent of the 1,000 frequent flyers questioned said issues such as sustainability did not affect the amount of international business travel undertaken by their organisations.