Absorbing Carbon
Is Sustainability Awareness Translating to Action?
Carbon reduction practices still need to mature, but reporting regulation, government incentives and cultural pressures all contribute to change.
“Doing something is always better than doing nothing,” American Express Global Business Travel sustainability SVP Nora Lovell Marchant told a BTN webinar audience last summer. “The United Nations doesn’t have the power politically to wave a magic wand to say 'these are global carbon standards.' If we are all waiting for something like that to happen, we can kiss the goals of the Paris Agreement goodbye.”
Marchant was referring to the climate change agreement of 2015 in which world leaders pledged to cut their respective countries' greenhouse gas emissions to try to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius—the level at which climate scientists estimate would be a breaking point above which the planet would sustain irreversible damage.
The trajectory for keeping that ceiling, admittedly, does not look great on the macrolevel. According to Climate Action Tracker, current emission reduction pledges across global governments are on a trajectory to break that ceiling. A UN analysis for COP28—the most recent annual “Conference of the Parties” that committed to the Paris Agreement—determined, in brief, that additional "deep, rapid and sustained reductions" in greenhouse gas emissions were needed to prevent a permanent breach of 1.5C.
Government Strategy to Business Travel Strategy?
In lieu of global carbon standards or shared strategies, governments are applying a number of approaches to induce their societies—including industries—to reduce. The European Union has been aggressive on the regulatory front with its broad-based Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, rolling out in phases over the next several years to include more and smaller companies as the phases progress. It includes business travel emissions as a single line item but is notable in its holistic approach to include Scope 3 emissions in its purview.
The U.S., as well, has taken regulatory action, though it’s been subject to numerous delays. The Securities and Exchange Commission in March adopted rules that standardize climate-related disclosures in reporting by public companies; however, this is currently restricted to Scope 1 and 2 emissions. While previous proposals included reporting requirements for Scope 3 emissions, the final rule has been criticized for its “watered down” approach.
California has stepped into the gap. The state’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act also mandates GHG emissions and climate risk disclosures—including Scope 1 and 2 emissions from 2026 and Scope 3 from 2027. Like the EU’s CSRD, its reach is broad.
The requirements apply to public and private companies that are “doing business in California” and with total annual revenues of $1 billion or more. Moreover, Scope 3 emissions reporting rules under California’s climate bill apply to “sources that a reporting entity owns or directly controls, regardless of location.” The California Lawyers Association has labeled this a “significant requirement” as it will require companies to track and report on their emissions worldwide. Scope 3 includes business travel. However, the bill has already faced opposition from the U.S. and CA Chambers of Commerce, along with multiple business groups, prompting a federal lawsuit and questions over a possible delay.
Addressing greenhouse gas emissions isn’t all about regulatory requirements; indeed, reporting on emissions data doesn’t necessarily translate into taking action. That said, many companies have pledged to do so, and voluntarily have submitted plans to the Science-based Target Initiative regarding the actions they will take to achieve net-zero operations by a certain date. (Net zero is the point at which an organization’s emissions can be absorb by the planet naturally.)
The other side of the environmental coin, of course, is pushing companies to act responsibly in terms of their current emissions and also in their current investment strategies to ensure their respective business activities can tread with a lighter carbon footprint into the future.
In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion in new climate finance to catalyze investments in climate change-related initiatives. The Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act includes $110 billion for similar purposes. So catalyzing projects and investment opportunities is another way that governments and corporates begin to intertwine their climate conservation initiatives.
Getting Personal?
Are you personally concerned about your company's carbon footprint from travel?
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 171 buyer respondents
What Are We Doing—and Why?
Sixty percent of respondents to BTN's survey of 189 business travel buyers, fielded March 25-May 17, worked for companies that have established overall carbon reduction goals. Among that 60 percent, 94 percent of them are pursuing more sustainable business travel practices. Some companies that had not established larger corporate goals nevertheless were pursuing some travel emissions reductions.
The most common driver for greener travel initiatives was that senior management had stressed its importance, but most respondents had cited other drivers as well. Chief among them was the effort to comply with either voluntary or government required reporting, like the EU’s CSRD and potentially California’s Climate Accountability Act. This was a commonality among 36 percent of survey respondents.
For others, pursuing eco-friendly strategies is a matter of attracting or keeping their clients and employees.
In the same way that sustainability is getting baked into the business travel procurement process (learn about GBTA’s new standardized sourcing templates), the companies travel managers support make up the supply chain, service providers and strategic partners of other businesses—and they are looking for planet friendly partners to support their own sustainability efforts. More than one-third of travel buyers said their companies are looking to provide that strategic value to clients who have stressed the importance of alignment with emissions reduction goals.
Employees, too, have a choice of where they spend their time and how to spend their money—and many Gen Z and Millennial workers are accounting for companies’ environmental credentials in those decisions. About a quarter of respondents said they were aware of their companies’ efforts to attract and retain employees who care about sustainable corporate practices.
According to Deloitte, such companies are positioning themselves well for in the fight for talent. The consulting giant’s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey showed 72 percent of Gen Zs and 71 percent of Millennials look at environmental credentials and policies when considering a potential employer. When it comes to spending the money they make from working, Deloitte's results showed younger generations look for goods and services with light carbon footprints. Plus, they are willing to spend more on them.
Twelve percent of BTN survey respondents said their companies had other business reasons for pursuing sustainable travel strategies; 9 percent said they didn’t know why they were putting in the effort.
Targeting Sustainability
Has your company established overall carbon reduction targets?
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 175 buyer respondents
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 175 buyer respondents
Diverse Drivers
For what reasons is your organization pursuing a strategy of reducing business travel emissions?
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 172 buyer respondents
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 172 buyer respondents
Who Responded to This Survey & Why It Matters
Eighty-five percent of respondents to this year’s survey sat in North America, where sustainability initiatives tend to be less mature than they are in Europe. Just 13 percent of respondents to the 2024 questionnaire were located in Europe. BTN will field a dedicated survey to the Europe market this summer.
Even so, 66 percent of respondents had responsibility for managing travel programs that covered their European colleagues. Ninety-five percent had purview over the United States and North America. While vanishingly few respondents managed travel from company locations in the Middle East, Africa, South America or Asia-Pacific, they nevertheless had travel management purview for those regions at 41 percent, 34 percent, 45 percent and 54 percent, respectively.
Location and regions managed hold sway when it comes to driving a corporate culture of sustainability. Those with travel management responsibility for Europe were 50 percent more likely than buyers without responsibility for Europe to work for companies with emissions reduction goals. Among those whose companies ONLY managed travel in North America, more than half said either their companies did not have emissions reduction goals or that they were not aware of any such goals.
It’s important to have that context for viewing the data from this report, understanding that the respondent mix weights the survey results somewhat toward sustainability trends in North America and, specifically, the U.S. market.
It is also worth addressing at the outset that large travel programs—those that spent more than US$50 million on travel in 2023 have a decidedly stronger bias toward sustainability overall than do companies with small and midsize travel programs. Among respondents of those large programs, 72 percent work for companies that have identified sustainability goals. Among respondents who manage between $10 million and $50 million annually, 58 percent worked for companies with sustainability goals. For those who manage less than $10 million in annual travel spend, just 33 percent were in companies actively working to reduce emissions.
What Are We Doing Here?
What has the travel team been tasked with delivering and/or managing to meet carbon emissions reduction targets?
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 172 buyer respondents
Making Actions Count
While one-third of travel managers have been tasked with reducing travel as a surefire way of cut travel-related emissions, there are other ways to drive emissions reductions. Visibility into those emissions, is always the first line of attack, a fact that came through in the BTN survey.
It All Starts with Data
Fifty-six percent of travel buyers have been tasked with delivering emissions data on their company’s travel activities. And it’s the right first step, according to Salesforce EMEA and Latam senior manager of travel and sustainability Jenny Sabineu. But, she said, getting a solid data set from multiple sources and digging into the finer features of the data is what ultimately makes meaningful action possible, and it’s not easy.
“Our real data before structuring a program was all over the place,” she said, citing booking tools, expense tools, credit cards and suppliers all as emissions data sources that had to be normalized for Salesforce’s proprietary carbon calculations.
Once you have the data, then you have to interrogate it. “You need to run your data. What is it telling you? Where are those opportunities for your company?” she challenged. “Just because [a benchmarking partner] is doing something successfully in Chicago does not mean that Salesforce is going to have those same opportunities.”
Check out the “mini-case studies” in this article for some examples of companies that applied their data intelligence to save carbon.
Mini-Case Study
OKTA
What: Reducing Meetings Emissions
How: Produced a sustainability guidebook for meeting planners and routed meeting requests through the ESG team
Who: Kathy Kaden, Okta Global Travel Manager
The travel and meetings department of employee and customer identity solutions company Okta launched its sustainability efforts in 2023 with a program focused on meetings and events—and it basically didn't cost the business a dime. One impetus behind the move was to see how the department could contribute to the company's overall sustainability goals.
The team created a "Start with Sustainability" campaign in which questions were added to its M&E request form that would cause requesters to consider if their events and locations were as sustainable as they could be. The questions include such topics as whether the location minimizes employee travel, if rail over air is an option, or if public transit is available. Those requests also now go to the company's ESG team and physical security team for review.
The travel and meetings team also launched a sustainable travel guidebook along with a related travel game that awards points for sustainable actions and recognizes "sustainability champions" for their efforts. The plan seems to be paying off as Okta travel leaders have said meeting owners are thinking more about the viability of locations, how many people really need to attend, whether events can be combined to cut down on employee travel.
The travel and meetings department also is working with the marketing events team—a separate division that owns some of the company's largest meetings and events—to consider using shuttles instead of individual rides for its next big annual sales conference, which estimates show could save about 1.5 tons of CO2 emissions as well as $30,000.
It's a little soon to calculate the return on investment on these efforts, but the travel and meetings department is now tracking several sustainability-related metrics, and a data analyst began in February 2024. Part of that person's remit is to measure the department's sustainability progress.
— By Donna M. Airoldi
Influencing Traveler Behavior
More than 40 percent of buyers—the next largest group—said they were looking to change traveler booking behaviors. That takes a lot of traveler education to communicate why the company is pursuing greener travel strategies and to ensure employees are booking travel responsibly. Anecdotally, travel buyers have told BTN they include sustainability education in employee onboarding sessions, they have created webinars and videos about sustainable travel, deployed messaging on travel-oriented intranet landing pages, messaged about it within social and collaboration channels like Yammer or Slack.
Policy Pressure
Has your organization changed any travel approval thresholds or travel policies to deliver on these expectations?
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 172 buyer respondents
Only 22 percent of survey respondents had gone so far as changing policies to focus on sustainability; at this point, most of the focus seems to be on providing education and optionality because if you don’t want travelers to do X, you have to provide them with an alternative to X, only then can you hardwire the policy.
Check out the next mini-case study on how Parexel stopped short of a hard policy change—and added a sweetener—to evolve traveler behavior away from booking airlines.
Mini-Case Study
PAREXEL
What: Shift from Air to Train Travel
How: Preferencing rail for non-stop journeys of up to four hours and allowing premium seating
Who: Ben Park, Executive Director of Travel & Sustainability
For clinical research organization, Parexel, shifting travelers from airplanes to long-distance trains involved establishing travel parameters that are palatable for both travelers and the business.
Ben Park, Parexel's executive director of travel and sustainability, said the company prefers rail travel for non-stop journeys of up to four hours. Additionally, any train journey exceeding two hours qualifies for business or first-class booking, in contrast to flights, which are restricted to economy class.
“By enhancing the seating experience on long-distance rail journeys, we've made it a more appealing option for our traveling colleagues,” said Park.
The company has also recognized the productivity benefits of train travel. “Although train tickets can sometimes be pricier than plane tickets, the overall advantage for the company is substantial,” Park says. “Travelers face less stress, enjoy a more pleasant journey, and can work seamlessly with WiFi, contributing to the planet's wellbeing. It's a triple win for the company.”
While the rail over flight policy has global reach, it is not hard-wired across the program. The team is taking a country-by-country approach and conducts local campaigns to educate travelers about domestic rail options and encourages choosing trains over flights, with periodic assessments of compliance.
- By Lauren Arena
UK-based engineering and management consultancy Mott MacDonald is one company, however, where sustainability has touched policy. Like Parexel—and like 30 percent of respondents to BTN’s survey, the company is shifting focus away from lowest logical airfares to other modalities. In this case, Mott MacDonald has identified carbon-efficient rail options across nearly 20 domestic routes. The policy change requires travelers to book rail on these routes, unless they have specific approval to book air.
Since the modal shift campaign was introduced last July, group travel manger Flo Chick says carbon emissions on the identified routes have dropped by 50 percent.
Where many travel managers have been thwarted in behavior change efforts, however, has been in the booking path itself, with tools that have not incorporated intuitive ways to encourage eco-friendly travel options or configurations that help apply emissions-oriented policies to the booking workflows.
Chick said OBT preferencing capabilities will be critical in driving further behavior change among travelers, such as the ability to sort search results according to carbon emissions rather than by cost.
“Once you've got the tools to do that, you don't have to necessarily write the policy so much as apply the logic in the rules,” she explains. Today, however, Chick says her OBT does not provide “that sort of nuance.”
Salesforce is another company looking to make deep behavior changes among traveling employees, read the following mini-case study to see how this award-winning program began to distribute emissions data as a direct driver of behavior change.
Mini-Case Study
SALESFORCE
What: Change Traveler Booking Behaviors
How: Distributing Sustainability Dashboards
Who: Jenny Sabineu, Salesforce Sr. Manager of Travel for EMEA, LATAM and Sustainability
Building off its longtime focus on corporate travel sustainability, customer relationship technology company Salesforce now delivers to travelers the data to sustainable travel decisions in the form of a dashboard that monitors their individual carbon footprints.
Salesforce launched the dashboard, built internally on its own platform, in April following a six-month pilot with a small group of employees. The platform ingests a customized API that combines booked and invoiced data—from its TMC American Express Global Business Travel. Employees can see how much carbon they are generating across categories, and managers can monitor the carbon footprints of their entire team.
The latter will be a key tool in Salesforce's climate action plan to cut business travel emissions intensity by at least 50 percent by 2030, as it enables leadership to be more mindful of business travel, said Jenny Sabineu, Salesforce senior manager of travel for EMEA and Latam and sustainability. Current business travel emissions comprise 10 percent of Salesforce’s total emissions picture.
"If someone is managing a team, it gives them access to data that wasn't accessible without requesting a bespoke report," Sabineu said. "We have the right policies and programs in place, but there was work to be done in bringing visibility to those who hold the purse strings."
The pilot period for the dashboard was crucial in developing how it looked and how it was able to deliver information that would be "understandable at all levels of the company," senior director of global travel Dorian Stonie said. "We're not just aggregating data and throwing it at the wall; the goal is to move the needle."
- By Michael Baker
Other Tactics
More than a quarter of BTN survey respondents said they were collaborating with their suppliers on carbon emissions reductions, whether that is by participating in turnkey programs or hammering out customized programs as part of their preferred contracts. Other respondents identified a collection of additional tactics: 13 percent invest in carbon offsets, 12 percent are funding sustainable aviation fuel and 10 percent are enforcing carbon limits on individuals or divisions.
At the bottom of the list is the idea of imposing a carbon fee on business travel—only 5 percent of companies said they had taken that step—but Amex GBT’s Nora Lovell-Marchant said that’s a tactic travel managers should really grab a hold of.
“There's no silver bullet,” she said. “But if there were a silver bullet, I would posit that it is carbon pricing.” She continued: “I think we can agree that our economy and our society doesn't account for carbon in the way that it should,” Marchant said. “This is a simple thing that you can do immediately” to bring more balance to that equation.
She described how a number of Amex GBT clients are putting a transaction fee for carbon at the point of sale. That budget builds over time, until the company decides where to invest those sustainability dollars, whether in offsets, SAF investments or new technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere. “You should invest where your goals are,” she said. “Hopefully in science-based targets and driving toward net zero.”
Companies like Bank of America, Microsoft, Meta and others have implemented carbon fees at varying levels. Most companies currently use a flat fee at the point of sale to represent an average emissions number. Some introduce such fees at a low dollar amount to prevent pricing shock, but ramp that amount up over time. Real-time trip emissions calculations and dynamic carbon pricing is starting to happen for companies with advanced systems in play.
Procurement Progress
“Sustainability isn’t seen as a license to operate in the U.S. just yet,” said Corporate Travel Management head of sustainability, Lauren Hook. “There is curiosity and interest, and [sustainability factors] are becoming more commonplace as a barrier to entry in the request for information and request for proposal process.”
Forty-seven percent of travel managers responding to BTN’s survey said they do ask at a meaningful level about suppliers’ internal sustainability activities as well as about sustainability programs for clients; an additional 15 percent ask about such information in a check-box exercise. Thirty-eight percent either do not ask or do not know.
How companies action that information is telling, however, in terms of commitment to greening their overall supply chains—and that’s an area that looks to be eroding somewhat in an era of high travel costs.
Just 10 percent of travel buyers said alignment on sustainability takes the highest priority in sourcing efforts; that compares to 13 percent in BTN’s North America survey last year. If all else is equal—meaning pricing, product and service—sustainability factors then come into play for 31 percent of travel buyers. A fifth of travel buyers said pricing would generally outweigh any attention to supplier sustainability; 11 percent said even though their companies ask about sustainability factors in the RFP process, they don't really look at taking any action on it.
Getting the Details
To what extent does your organization ask emissions-related questions in supplier RFPs?
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 171 buyer respondents
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 171 buyer respondents
Taking Action
Does your organization actively contract with suppliers based on those details?
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 171 buyer respondents
BTN's 2024 Business Travel Sustainability Survey, 171 buyer respondents
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