Sustaining Business Travel

More than 36 percent of companies surveyed for BTN’s Sustainable Business Travel issue said their companies in the past 12 months had increased their public commitment to sustainable business practices. That’s not to say all these companies committed to reducing business travel emissions, per se, but it shows awareness growing in the global business community around climate change realities—and the impact business practices have on carbon consumption rates and rising global temperatures. 

Where travel practices fit into that mix will be different for every company. A consulting company, for example, might tie 80 percent or more of its carbon emissions to travel. Whereas a mining or energy company might set that number somewhere closer to 5 percent. Those differences alone will influence how travel practices are prioritized in terms of emissions reduction strategy—but a funny thing happened as Covid-19 forced nearly every company’s attention toward its business travel practices.  

At the bullseye of the pandemic, business travel was scrutinized from every angle. Safety—check. Cost—check. Travel patterns—check. Internal—Check. Client-facing—check. Effectiveness—for sure. Half of survey respondents said their companies had increase focus on business travel emissions, even if they did not make actual commitments to reducing them.   

As the travel shutdown morphed into a fundamental restructuring of corporate work and life, now mediated by technology that kept people off the roads and out of the air, even stranger things began to happen. Lake waters became clearer; heavy smog and polluted air lifted over China. NASA began to track the phenomenon and found dramatic reduction in certain pollutants as measured by on-the-ground samples in cities around the world: Wuhan (60 percent reduction); Milan (60 percent reduction); New York (45 percent reduction). 

Yet the return to “normal” life as the Covid-19 epidemic eased in China and other locations re-upped greenhouse gas emissions and has at times exceeded pre-pandemic levels. The challenge, as we all push toward renewed economic growth, is to find a prosperity strategy that doesn’t pull us back into pre-pandemic emission rates. That won’t be easy. But business leaders BTN spoke to agreed that Covid-19 pushed them to think about structural models that didn’t exist prior to the pandemic and has accelerated a re-think around business processes and how to leave a smaller carbon footprint. 

Sustainable Business Practices Aren’t All Covid-Induced

Sustainable business practice commitments have come in waves. The previous wave peaked in the early 2000s, but for many companies ebbed as the global economic downturn bore down on businesses in 2008. The Paris Climate Accord in 2015 again drew attention to the issue among government and business leaders. The agreement, which grew to include 197 countries, committed participants to work together to fight climate change and defined a baseline goal of limiting global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels and to actively pursuing efforts that would limit the temperature increase further to 1.5C. 

The climate accord hasn’t escaped controversy, particularly in regard to U.S. participation. The Trump administration announced in 2017 its intention to pull the country out of the agreement. Due to safeguards built into the accord precisely to forestall what was considered uncertain U.S. commitment from the beginning, the country which emits 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions did not formally leave the accord until Nov. 4, 2020—ironically, the day after the U.S. election that determined a shift to a new administration. President Joe Biden rejoined the accord on Feb. 19, 2021, less than a month into his presidency and has made fighting climate change a central pillar of both his domestic and foreign policies. Global leaders now must grapple with how long that re-commitment will last in a polarized political climate.

For the business community, however, government commitment to the Paris Climate Accord notwithstanding, a reckoning regarding its contribution to climate change emerged in 2018 and 2019 fixed in the unflinching gaze of Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg. Her one-person protests and eventual high-profile speeches at the United Nations inspired a social upheaval and massive environmental protests in cities around the globe. It pushed a particular indictment of the travel industry, coining the term “flygskam”—or shame in flying. BTN named Thunberg among the Most Influential People in Business Travel in 2019 for the focus she brought to environmental issues surrounding travel in general, but also to business travel and influencing how companies considered making business travel practices more sustainable.