While leisure air travel has recovered to near pre-pandemic levels, corporate air travel has been far slower to recover.
This is according to the latest analysis from Travel Smart Emissions Tracker, which shows that almost half of the 217 global companies surveyed reduced their carbon emissions from business travel by at least 50% between 2019 and 2022. has been done.
This is true given that, according to the Department for Transport and the Environment, to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, business travel needs to be reduced by 50% from pre-COVID-19 levels over the next 10 years. It is a sustainable step in the direction.
Supporting this movement are various governments that are tightening regulations that place more responsibility on companies to achieve these goals.
From July 2024, Dutch companies will start reporting to the government their progress towards the mandatory 50% reduction in domestic mobility emissions by 2030.
Short-haul flights are prohibited while in France, and the French government is replacing flights of less than two-and-a-half hours with rail travel.
More and more companies are implementing strategies to go beyond government regulations and reduce travel emissions, aiming for ambitious net-zero targets.
So while some corporate players, such as JPMorgan Chase, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson, are inching closer to 2019 flying levels, more companies are looking to forget their former high-flying days. It is said that
The report said the companies making the biggest cuts to corporate air travel were software giant SAP, pharmaceutical company Pfizer, banking group Lloyds and Big Four firm PwC.
SAP turns to distributed events
For more than a decade, climate action has been at the top of SAP's corporate sustainability agenda, and tackling business travel has become a recent priority.
By increasing the use of virtual meetings and curating events more strategically, SAP was able to reduce airline carbon emissions by a staggering 86% between 2019 and 2022.
Consider the software giant's latest Sapphire conference. Rather than conceptualizing it as his one central event in Orlando, Florida, as in the past, SAP held distributed events in the United States, Spain, Brazil, and online.
This enabled SAP to reduce its CO2 emissions by nearly 24,000 tons. “This is primarily due to the shorter flight distances, mathematically speaking, which is the equivalent of approximately 2,200 round-the-world flights,” said Jenny Bittman, SAP's event manager.
Carbon offsets are also part of the company's sustainable travel strategy.
“As far as emissions go, we want to further reduce our travel activity and have been purchasing carbon offsets for unavoidable travel for some time,” says Bittman.
