What does travelling smart mean for Opportunity Green?
As a climate NGO we have a strict policy on approving business flights: we avoid flying whenever possible and staff need the express permission of the CEO (me!) to take a flight. But I recognise that this policy won’t work for all businesses, and this is why the Travel Smart campaign is so vital.
The 2023 Travel Smart Ranking measures efforts made by global companies towards reducing corporate air travel emissions. The main objective of the campaign is to get companies to reduce business flying emissions by 50% or more from 2019 levels.
The campaign was born out of the idea that companies have a unique opportunity to lead this change. Business travellers make up 12% of passengers, but they also make up to 75% of revenues on certain flights, so their choices have important leverage on the aviation industry. This means that corporate leaders and employees can have significant impact if they think carefully about flying less for work.
So what steps can businesses take to address their corporate flying emissions? The campaign sets out four steps:
Set business flying emissions reduction targets
Reduce frequent flying
Substitute virtual collaboration for long-haul flying
Shift from regional air travel to bus, sail or rail
We think about this a lot at Opportunity Green. Founded in October 2021, we’ve only booked one flight for business purposes so far and that was only because of the British rail strikes leaving no other travel option. While that’s something I’m proud of, I also recognise that we might need to fly more in future.
As a relatively new organisation, this policy is easier to establish as we don’t have a custom of flying for work. Plus, we are (only) 10 people, predominantly operating in Europe, though working on global issues. So far, the opportunities for global travel have not outweighed the climate impact they would have. Having said that, we’ve undertaken some epic rail journeys as Opportunity Green in the name of sustainable travel!
The Sail & Rail London to Dublin
This is a journey I take in my personal life many times a year. It takes about a day, with trains leaving London at 9am and the boat getting into Dublin port at 5.30pm. Here’s a great explainer of the whole London to Dublin journey (or feel free to reach out and ask me directly – I love a good sail & rail chat!).
The issue is that, since mid-2022 British trains are just not reliable due to strikes. And, the boats are not dog friendly, which makes travelling with our Chief Security Officer, Roo, a challenge.
Our Project Assistant, Blánaid Sheeran will be getting the train all the way from London to Lisbon in May. And we also have people travelling from to Amsterdam and even Devon to Berlin entirely via train travel. We don’t yet have a firm limit on how long we expect people to get the train before they would fly, but we’ll keep it under review.
Balancing travel and growth
Trying to figure this out while running a growing business (well, we’re a charity, but it faces the same challenges) gives me a lot of sympathy and insight into what it must be like for others. When opportunities arise, you want to be able to go and get them, so how do you ensure your travel is sustainable?
This is where the Travel Smart campaign can really help businesses to understand what is achievable. They have ranked 322 companies on their aviation emissions for business travel and set the gold standard of what all companies should be doing to reduce those emissions.
This year, Opportunity Green teamed up with Travel Smart to look into the Irish firms in the ranking. We found that only one Irish business reports the full climate impacts of their aviation emissions and not one single Irish company has set a target to reduce corporate travel emissions.
In addition to the CO2 emissions from flying, aviation also emits nitrous oxides, sulphur dioxide, water and particulate matter (soot). These are commonly referred to as non-CO2 emissions, and it is estimated that they account for two thirds of total climate warming from flying. Yet only 40 of the companies that were included in the global ranking even reported on these climate impacts of their flying.
We are constantly hearing that the business sector is vital to tackling the climate crisis – and at Opportunity Green we firmly believe that this can bring huge benefits in jobs, clean air and more liveable cities.
However, that will require concerted action from the business sector, and reporting their aviation emissions is surely only the baseline of what is required from them? We’re already looking forward to the 2024 ranking and will be expecting, at the very least, to see all the climate impacts from aviation fully accounted for. And then we can start the even more important task of reducing them.
