Managing our travel emissions
Business travel remains our single largest source of carbon emissions, and so we committed to reducing it by 50% by 2030 in line with our near term Net Zero Target. Although travel emissions have gradually increased since pandemic restrictions were lifted, we've maintained our total carbon emissions at 51% of our 2019 baseline, just shy of our 2030 target. We have a Net Zero Working Group and Thoughtful Travel programme in place to ensure we remain on track to meet our 2030 Net Zero commitments.
Business travel is a necessary part of the way we work, as our ability to serve our clients largely depends on being able to visit their locations. It's also important for building relationships, which is at the core of our brand. However, we continue to challenge ourselves on the need, frequency and mode of travel.
Between 2019 and 2023 we halved our carbon emissions from business travel, while increasing the size of our business by a third, highlighting how we’re decoupling our business growth.
Our approach
Our strategy for reducing travel emissions involves both reducing the number of journeys our people make and also looking for less carbon-intensive ways of working.
We've worked to reduce unnecessary journeys, encouraging both internal and client-facing teams to make better use of technology-based alternatives that support collaborative working from different locations.
And our travel policy encourages our people, once they’ve considered the need to travel, to use our internal systems to book travel, so we can improve our management information, risk management and costs.
Programmes
We have several programmes to help our people take practical measures to reduce their carbon footprint:
- Alternatives to travel
- Internal controls
- Low carbon driving
- Support for cycling
- Commuting
Alternatives to travel
The simplest way to cut emissions caused by travel is to avoid it. So our Thoughtful Travel programme challenges our peoples to “Sense check their travel”, while also providing practical ways to lower their business travel carbon impact and hold conversations with clients.
Technology can help us to connect with clients and colleagues effectively, so we launched a multi-phased campaign to boost the use of online meetings, and encourage a “Virtual first" approach, which evolves to emphasise different benefits of the technology to our people, and specific features that aid collaboration.
When first launched, more than 5,000 of our people completed online training in these technologies. We instantly saw the average number of virtual collaborations per person rise significantly over that period, and while we saw a marked reduction in business travel, most of the collaborations were in additive, enhancing our connectivity, and client collaboration capabilities. It’s one part of our wider digital transformation.
More on our environmental impact
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