While air travel for leisure has bounced back to near pre-pandemic heights, corporate air travel has been much slower to return.
That’s according to the latest analysis from Travel Smart Emissions Tracker, which shows almost half of the 217 global companies tracked slashed their business travel carbon emissions by at least 50% between 2019 and 2022.
Given that a 50% reduction in business travel from pre-Covid levels is necessary this decade to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to Transport and Environment – this is a sustainable step in the right direction.
Supporting this move are various governments, stepping up with regulations that put more responsibility on companies to meet these goals.
From July 2024, businesses in the Netherlands will start to report to the government on progress towards the mandated 50% reduction in their domestic mobility emissions by 2030.
While in France, short-haul flights are banned – with the French government replacing flights under two and a half hours with train journeys.
Beyond government regulation, more companies are introducing strategies to cut travel emissions, as they look to ambitious net-zero goals.
So while some corporate players edge closer to 2019 flying levels, like JP Morgan Chase, Merck and Johnson & Johnson, many more are putting their old, high-flying days behind them.
Among companies reducing their corporate air travel the most, according to the report – software giant SAP, pharma company Pfizer, banking group Lloyd’s and Big Four firm PwC.
SAP Turns to Decentralised Events
For over a decade now, climate action has been at the top of SAP’s corporate sustainability agenda and tackling business travel a more recent priority.
By increasing the use of virtual meetings and being more strategic in the curation of events, SAP reduced airline carbon emissions by a staggering 86% between 2019 and 2022.
Take the software giant’s most recent Sapphire conference. Instead of conceptualising as one central event in Orlando, Florida, as has been done in the past, SAP organised a decentralised event in the US, Spain, Brazil and online.
With this, SAP reduced CO2 emissions by nearly 24,000 tonnes, due primarily to the shorter distances travelled in mathematical terms, that corresponds to around 2,200 around-the-world flights,” according to SAP’s Event Manager Jenny Bittmann.
Carbon offsetting is also part of the company’s sustainable travel strategy.
“As far as emissions are concerned, we want to reduce travel activities even more, and we’ve been purchasing carbon offsets for unavoidable trips for some time now,” says Bittmann.