Better business travel

As a globally focused university, it is important that we continue to enable our academics and students to travel to conduct world-leading research that furthers the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Yet research suggests that air travel may account for around 80-95% of universities’ business travel emissions, and air travel has one of the highest carbon footprints of any human activity.

That is why we will publish and promote a new sustainable business travel policy by December 2022 to encourage business travel to be made as mindfully as possible, based on sectoral good practice, such as adopting the Tyndall Centre travel decision tree and travel hierarchy.

This will support staff to make informed and responsible business travel decisions such as using the train rather than plane for domestic journeys under a certain distance – subject to equality impact analysis.

The policy will also include good practice guidance on carbon compensation as appropriate for staff business travel and student fieldtrips.

As with many areas of our carbon accounting, we also want to improve the data on our business travel. We will do this in partnership with a travel management company by December 2022. In doing so, we will select a partner for staff (and, in some circumstances, students) through whom to book their business travel, whose algorithms provide the optimal balance between value for money and sustainable travel, and which are consistent with our sustainable business travel policy.

We will also ensure that they provide excellent quality carbon impact data for our net zero reporting and an attractive and easy to use interface that will encourage all staff to book their business travel through a central system.

In addition to making travel more sustainable, we also want to make the decision not to travel to be more appealing in certain circumstances by reviewing our video conferencing options and identifying if there is a business case to procure new technology solutions such as those using virtual reality, to give a better remote meeting and conferencing experience.

We will also engage with our academic community to understand if there is scope to offer more domestic field trips to students and/or options to compensate emissions incurred through voluntary activities within the areas that they are visiting. 

Once we have completed these actions by December 2022 we will begin to set annual targets for reduction in business travel from August 2023. We hope that, if appropriate and necessary, these will enable us to achieve the recommended targets of achieving a 30% reduction in business travel by 2030 and a 40% reduction by 2035 as currently assumed within our internal carbon pathway analysis for achieving net zero by 2035.