Emissions enigmas

Last week, a multinational travel manager whose company uses five different online booking tools worldwide checked the volume of CO2 emissions each tool assigned for an economy seat on exactly the same flight.

The results (for British Airways departure BA173 from London Heathrow to New York JFK on Tuesday 6 December) should, in principle, have been identical. But they weren’t – and far from it. The highest CO2 figure was nearly 400 per cent greater than the lowest.

In consequence, the travel manager (who has requested anonymity) has put efforts to green her company travel programme on hold while she tries to sort out the mess. “This has put us a step back in our sustainability strategy,” she says. “The reporting is just not consistent.”

This travel manager’s experience is a textbook example of what the European Commission has identified as a major barrier to reducing emissions from transport – a key priority for the European Union because, the Commission said recently, “transport remains for the moment the only economic sector where total emissions are higher than they were in 1990.”

The Commission went on to state: “Currently, there exists no common and universally accepted greenhouse gas emissions accounting framework for the transport and logistics sectors… this leads to substantial divergences in emissions data calculation results.” Consequently, inconsistent reporting is “hindering the overall effectiveness of GHG accounting as a policy tool to incentivise environmentally friendly business and consumer choices for transport/mobility.”

The problem is ubiquitous. Airlines and other suppliers are unaligned in how they report their emissions and how much data they will share; and, as the example above shows, so too are distributors of travel.

Nor is there standardisation in how companies report their travel emissions so that their sustainability achievements may be compared with each other. The pharma giant Novartis is just one of countless examples of the struggle to find the right yardsticks. In common with many businesses, the company’s own reporting shows its emissions caused by business travel plummeted from 191,300 tonnes in 2019 to 22,000 tonnes in 2020 as the pandemic suppressed trip volumes.

Then, in 2021, reported emissions jumped up again, to 35,500 tonnes, but this was not owing to an increase in travel. Instead, Novartis had changed its reporting methodology in two ways. First, it started measuring train, car rental and hotel emissions in addition to air emissions. Second, its measurement of air travel emissions began taking into account radiative forcing (the more damaging effects of emitting gases at altitude), which multiplied the result by a factor of 1.9.

Emissions reporting, says Advito principal and vice president for global practices and sales Olivier Benoit, should follow the science, but he adds, “often the science is not agreed upon” – radiative forcing being a case in point. Advito recommends that a radiative force multiplier is applied, but estimates of the appropriate multiplier generally range from 2 to 3. On the other hand, some companies ignore radiative forcing completely in their reporting.

Advito is one of many companies to have created methodologies to help clients measure their emissions. But, says Patrick Diemer, chair of BT4Europe, which lobbies regulators on behalf of 13 European travel management associations, “we believe legislation is needed to direct which reporting standard is going to be used for your footprint. It is necessary to cut through the large number of different standardisation initiatives which by themselves are very good, but are not helpful for travel managers to have to choose from.”

Along with the Global Business Travel Association, BT4E believes the best hope for achieving a single standard is the European Commission’s CountEmissions EU initiative. The statements from the Commission quoted above are from its call for evidence for CountEmissions EU, launched in late 2021. That was followed this year by a three-month public consultation period which closed on 20 October.

Walter Goetz, head of cabinet for the EU’s transport commissioner, told the GBTA Sustainability Summit in Brussels earlier this month that he expects proposals for standardisation to be announced in 2023. “It is important to put some benchmarks at European level,” he said.

The stated objectives of CountEmissions EU include “providing a single EU framework for calculating GHG emissions data of transport operations/services in freight and passenger sectors; making available reliable and comparable information on the GHG intensity of individual transport services; and facilitating the uptake of GHG emissions accounting in business practice.”

The Commission also wants to see a “verification regime [that] would cover aspects related to independent data assessment and verification.” Perhaps most crucially of all for the managed travel sector, which relies on cooperation between numerous parties in a dense eco-system of suppliers, intermediaries and customers, the verification regime would also oversee “the organisation of data exchange between parties, with particular reference to the use of digital tools and frameworks.”

Goetz told the GBTA summit that “it is still to be seen how strict we will go at the regulatory level,” but Diemer is relaxed on this point. “It’s irrelevant whether it’s going to be legally mandatory or voluntary because, even if the standard is voluntary from a legal perspective, buyers will demand it from suppliers,” he says. “It will become de facto mandatory by market forces.”

There are two issues that concern Diemer more. The first is ensuring that standardised emissions information is imposed not only for post-trip reporting, when the data can include confirmed details such as the load factor and passenger/freight ratio on a flight.

Important as this information is, BT4E  also wants standardised estimates for emissions at point of booking so that the crazy inconsistencies experienced by the travel manager on her five different booking tools are eliminated. “We will advocate that these default values become part of the legislative package,” says Diemer.

The other wish of BT4E is for speed. “We advocate taking the first pragmatic steps now and fixing methodology and definition errors to become more precise at a later stage,” says Diemer.

While the wait goes on, Benoit firmly believes that lack of a standard “should not be an excuse not to act today because there are already schemes available that are good enough to estimate emissions”. He cites the UK’s widely used Defra model as an example.

And there are even more empirical steps travel managers can take to make sound 'green' choices. “Just know that on average newer, narrow-bodied aircraft are 44 per cent less emitting than the aircraft that that they are retiring,” an airline executive told BTN’s Entertainment Summit in London back in September. “If you do nothing else, find a new aircraft. It’s going to be less emitting.”