Before Net Zero

Last month I attended BTN Group’s first in-person Sustainable Business Travel Summit. It was such a pleasure to see our friends and colleagues face to face, but also inspiring to see an industry collaborating furiously around a single issue. Awareness of the stakes involved in not cleaning up the carbon emissions released from our collective business travel activities has never been clearer, never been more urgent.

But there is a lot to do. And there is a lot still to learn. 

Travel managers won’t instantaneously become sustainability experts just because our respective organizations have newfound—and, in some cases, newly regulated—attention for limiting carbon emissions. Thankfully, many companies, including those in the travel industry, have hired sustainability experts into their ranks to lead these efforts. 

If your company has done so, by all means lean into that resource and see how you can be a part of your organization’s overall sustainability solution. If not, then reach out to your travel industry partners and understand how you can take the initial steps of tracking the carbon footprint of your organization’s business travel. Your travel management company, airlines, hotels and third-party data experts are developing the tools to get you started. 

As always, the first step really is education. I hope this issue can put you on the path toward more sustainable business travel policies and practices. We’ve reported some recent—and important—news about new resources and services coming into play, trends articles on the industry trajectory toward sustainable practices and also provided in-depth explainers about the mechanics buyers like you are engaging with to reach carbon reduction targets for business travel.

BTN also wants to do its part to provide sustainability resources and tools to you, the business travel manager. As such, we’ve partnered with CAPA Centre for Aviation and Envest Global to distribute their recent—and excellent—airline sustainability benchmarking report. You’ll find that for sale on our website www.businesstravelnews.com, along with our always-free access to best-practices articles and information to get your sustainable business travel strategy going.