[Webinar] Carbon budgets: Swiss Re's journey
to halve air travel emissions
Key information
- Title: Carbon Budgets Masterclass: How Swiss Re Achieved More Than 50% Reduction in Air Travel Emissions
- Date: 17 July 2024
- Host: Adam Braun, Co-founder and CEO of Clarasight
- Participants: Andreas Gisler, Head of Travel Management and Leopoldo Gorla Senior Environmental Management Specialist at Swiss Re; Denise Auclair, Travel Smart Campaign Manager at Transport & Environment
- Watch the webinar here.
Introduction
A new stage for sustainability has been reached in the corporate world: A shift from measuring emissions, to taking action to reduce emissions.
What are the leading mechanisms driving change and transformation? Carbon budgets are a prime example. They are the first amongst best practices identified by the Travel Smart Ranking of over 300 global companies on commitments and progress toward reducing air travel emissions. Denise Auclair highlighted several others: adopting a “virtual first” policy, prioritising rail when possible, eliminating one-day trips, decentralising operations, and incentivising goal achievement.
Adam Braun set the context: historically, companies haven’t done department-level carbon planning – but today there is a new regulatory and business imperative to do it.
On the one hand, corporate sustainability reporting regulations will now require 50,000 companies to not only report on their historical emissions but to move forward with carbon targets and have credible transition plans to achieve emissions reductions.
On the other hand, large companies are now asking suppliers to set targets and create carbon plans, recognizing that 70 to 80% of emissions are often within the supply chain.
When it comes to reducing business travel emissions, Clarasight has identified four essentials where its carbon planning software can offer key capabilities: ensuring sustainability is a driver of business value, implementing drivers of behaviour change (eg. carbon budget, pricing, tie to compensation), modelling forecasts and scenarios for real business needs, and providing business leaders with data and tools to succeed.
Andreas Gisler and Leopoldo Gorla spoke to these four components in their presentation, encapsulated in the below slide and Q&A. Swiss Re’s strategy, commitments and tools led to reducing their air travel emissions by more than 50%, and to their top performance in the Travel Smart Ranking.
Source: This timeline is from Swiss Re’s presentation
Questions & Answers (Q&A)
Swiss Re
We know this is a collaborative journey, can you provide an overview of who have been the key stakeholders driving the commitment to your travel emissions reduction, and why this is important to them given their roles?
In our case, the main commitment came directly from our senior management, the group Executive Committee, which is also responsible for the implementation of our group sustainability strategy. This has been a key element that helped the whole organisation to build the strategy, develop the necessary tools and also deliver on the commitments. It also supported collaboration between the sustainability and travel teams.
Can you clarify what was the tipping point that you believe most helped get internal adoption to move to develop carbon budgets in particular?
The tipping point was the realisation in 2018 that the measures implemented in previous years didn’t really work – travel emissions were still going up. The senior management came to the conclusion that something else was needed. Therefore, it was decided to set a reduction target and implement a carbon budget that is coupled with our internal carbon price.
You’ve clearly built in-house software to enable forward-looking planning, ongoing analysis and custom carbon budget reporting – how long did this take and which capabilities unlocked the greatest transformation?
It took us a couple of years to get where we are today. We consolidated our travel agency landscape and the first iteration of the dashboard was available in 2018. It really helped a lot to have one single global travel agency in place with whom we speak and who provides our data. The key element is definitely the dashboard, which is also a self-service option for the line managers and cost controllers, and also key to keep the travel community engaged.
I’m sure you experienced resistance and may still today, what were the biggest obstacles you faced and how have you navigated that resistance? Is there anything you’d encourage others who want to implement similar strategies like a carbon budget?
We implemented the carbon budget just before we set our first target in 2020 when the pandemic started. The travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic helped because we were forced to stop travelling. And it proved to us that we could do business without travelling a lot.
There are some corporate trips that are necessary for business purposes, and we don’t aim to stop travelling nor to reduce to a level that isn’t sustainable financially for the company. But we managed to avoid all those unnecessary trips that were happening in the past. Therefore, we kept some of these pandemic learnings to keep our emissions low.
Were there any notable strategies or communication approaches that proved effective in gaining support from different departments or leadership levels?
An important thing is to have the data available to show to the senior management what needs to be done and also what are the outcomes of implementing those measures.
Travel Smart
You called out some tactics of top performers but, what have you seen as unique culturally about top performing companies on your list?
I’ll highlight three main elements: the first is commitment. In Swiss Re’s presentation we can see how they got started, how they set a target and how over time they saw the opportunity to increase the ambition of the target. Their current target is in line with what Transport & Environment has assessed as being necessary for the sustainability of the future of aviation, which is to keep business travel emissions below 50% of pre-pandemic levels. Some of the other companies we talk to have highlighted the challenge of seeing their emissions on an upward trend after the lifting of travel restrictions in 2022 and 2023 – and how it’s really important to keep working towards their commitments.
The second is the continuous reassessment. Swiss Re is continuously reviewing and looking to improve the tools and measures they have. They recognised that the analysis that they did in 2018, where the average air travel per employee didn’t significantly reduce after implementing certain measures, is really significant. So they recognised which measures were working well and what was still lacking.
The third is about the multiple benefits that reducing emissions can bring and how that’s important for the company’s internal and external communication. As well as being good for the planet and for society, we can see the benefits of reducing emissions from a cost and economic perspective in the company, by for example avoiding unnecessary trips. But also from the travellers’ perspective, by caring for the employees and allowing them more freedom in the way they manage their travel choices, as Swiss Re did by building a self-service tool.
Time stamps
- [02:29-03:13] – Agenda of the webinar
- [03:13-04:10] – Introduction: Companies are shifting from measuring emissions to reducing emissions
- [04:10-11:30] – Denise Auclair presents the Travel Smart Ranking
- [11:30-18:20] – Adam Braun sets the context of corporate carbon planning
- [18:20-31:30] – Leopoldo Gorla presents Swiss Re’s approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions
- [31:30-38:20] – Andreas Gisler presents Swiss Re’s Travel Planning Tool and the implementation of carbon metrics
- [38:20-39:17] – Swiss Re’s key takeaways
- [39:17-56:00] – Q&A
More information
- Clarasight Definitive Guide to Implementing Sustainable Travel Programs
- Clarasight Carbon Budget Working Group
- Travel Smart Travel policy toolkit
- Travel Smart case studies