Power to the people

Accurately measuring the carbon footprint of business travel is a critical step in any emissions reduction strategy, but so too is quantifying and communicating the value of carbon. So when Amsterdam-based design and consulting firm Arcadis committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions across its value chain by 2035, it quickly set about engaging its c.10,000 frequent travellers around its reduction goals and equipping them with the tools to manage their emissions.

After consolidating travel data and introducing reporting dashboards that allow individual travellers to track their carbon footprint, the firm recently implemented carbon budgets for travel along with a set of tools to forecast and manage carbon ‘spend’.

This saw the travel management and sustainability teams collaborate with the company’s finance department to align financial planning with carbon reduction goals. Tina Armstrong, global sustainability director at Arcadis, explains that building a carbon budgeting process alongside finance helped the company develop a ‘language' around the value of carbon that has since been adopted across the firm.

“The language we use internally is ‘carbon efficiency’, like cost efficiency, because it should be treated like cost. It should have a planning process. It should go into your budget and you should look at it right alongside your euros or dollars. So that's really helped it become more real,” she says.

PROVIDING THE TOOLS

To help tie carbon and cost together, Arcadis developed proprietary tools built on both data from sustainability specialist Thrust Carbon and on its own trip data and financial metrics.

“Carbon as a currency is still very foreign for a lot of people… so from that question we started to look into what we needed to develop in order to help people,” says Jill Smit, Arcadis' global sustainability manager for travel.

A global carbon travel budget was introduced halfway through 2024 based on the prior year’s travel activity, Smit explains, and travellers were subsequently asked “tell us what you need” to enable the travel and sustainability teams to roll-out the necessary management tools.

These include a pre-trip emissions forecasting tool that uses flight emission averages to estimate the CO2 footprint of a particular route and a 'zero-based' travel carbon budgeting tool, which combines cost and emissions data to optimise travel planning in line with the company's net zero objectives.

“The budgeting tool is fairly high level. It provides region pairs as opposed to city pairs, so we would have Europe to the US as a pair, or Europe to Asia,” Smit explains. “It doesn't need to overwhelm people. It needs to give them the sense of ‘OK, I can roughly do two or three trips to the US [this year]’ because they don't exactly know which project they're going to be doing.”

The actual travel bookings are consolidated by category and then logged in a CO2 reporting dashboard powered by Thrust’s Engage platform. It enables travellers to track emissions related to business travel as well as gain insights on the potential impact of modal shift, like taking the train instead of a flight on a particular route, for example.

In 2024, the company also updated its carbon emissions methodology by applying a radiative forcing multiplier (which accounts for the indirect effects of the release of greenhouse gasses at altitude, such as flight contrails) and switching from the commonly used DEFRA calculation to ‘DEFRA+’ which, according to Arcadis’s 2024 Integrated Report, uses more recent aircraft and load factor data to calculate flight emissions.

As a result, the company’s business travel emissions in 2024 increased one per cent year-on-year to 32,300 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, but remained well below its 2019 baseline of 46,000 tCO2e.

The Arcadis travel programme doesn’t include an approvals process within its booking tool, so close collaboration across teams was “essential” for communicating travel policy changes and embedding sustainable practices, Smit says.

Instead, real-time messages and ‘nudges’ appear in the company’s booking tool via FCM Extension to encourage travellers towards sustainable choices.

Training sessions were also conducted to help senior leadership allocate department-level carbon budgets, while educational videos helped travellers understand how to use their new carbon management tools.

The company’s annual travel emissions report and quarterly updates are sent to approximately 9,000 travellers, with a 35 per cent engagement rate. “We've been tracking [engagement with reporting] over the year and we have actually seen a massive uptake compared to the first iteration. Here in the Netherlands, for example, we had a 42 per cent uptick at the end of the year,” Smit says.

CONTROL SHIFT

Last June, Arcadis also rolled out its Travel Sustainability Hub, a central source of information where all travellers can access carbon accounting methodologies, calculators and resources for low-carbon travel.

“We needed to make sure that we were building accountability within the business and enabling the people who are actually pressing the booking button to make the right decision to address business travel emissions,” says Armstrong.

“For us, this was a very deliberate transition to help us understand where the business needs to grow, where the business has the greatest client need, or where they're doing their field work. It's important that the business makes those decisions in ways that enable both growth and the reduction of emissions.”

She adds: “We spent quite a bit of time understanding [the hierarchy] within the business for who needed to be checking emissions, how frequently, and then how that would play out in terms of budgeting.”

Communication and training have proved critical in this transition, Armstrong explains, primarily when it comes to concerns about reduced travel affecting client projects. “We're trying to give [travellers] the tools and the knowledge to become conversant in what carbon efficiency really means – helping people understand that one longer trip has a lot less emissions than four short trips. Additionally, it’s about improving soft skills upfront to enhance their virtual meetings and collaboration capability,” she says.

This is in line with the company’s ‘virtual first’ travel policy, Armstrong explains, followed by a ‘travel with purpose’ approach to all trips. “We try to walk them through specific examples of how they could have done it a little bit more efficiently and that does seem to trigger some acknowledgment that this is not a travel ban.”

Underpinning that conversation with data has been an “essential” part of the process, Armstrong says. “Enabling the viewing of data on a regular basis [and] in a simplified format – where people can see their own [carbon emissions] data and leaders can see their team's data – that really makes a difference.”

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