Prepare for landing: practical tips on tracking, reporting and reducing business air travel emissions

Business travel, particularly by air, often makes up by far the largest part of the carbon footprint of knowledge-based organizations like SEI. Prepare for Landing offers sage advice to organizations that aim to monitor and ultimately reduce the emissions linked to their business travel – whether through cutting travel or making greater use of trains and other lower-carbon alternatives.

The advice is based on experiences at SEI and the University of East Anglia, both of which have adopted emissions-reduction policies, interviews with employees and a careful reading of existing reporting guidelines and other literature in the field.

It focuses on four aspects of designing and implementing policies on business travel emissions: reduction targets and indicators, decision support and travel data-gathering, reporting results, both internally and externally; and how organizations can create an enabling and encouraging environment for reduced business travel emissions.

The report also introduces a new business travel decision-support and reporting tool for organizations aiming to reduce their business travel footprint that is being developed under the TR²AIL project at SEI.

This work was supported by Vinnova and the Bolin Centre for Climate Research of Stockholm University.