Lower business travel carbon emissions with Lightning

 

Travel is back and a new mindset around sustainability has flourished.

Businesses around the world are committing to ambitious net-zero targets, governments are supporting with green taxes alongside rebates, loans and grants for greener investments in agriculture, renewables and energy-efficient cities.

Sustainable travel choices and more detailed information on the environmental impact of supply chains have continued to rise in the customer priorities in Corporate Travel Management’s (CTM’s) Global Customer Survey for 2022.

Travellers, Travel Bookers, and Travel Managers want an online booking platform that provides accurate guidance on emissions for flights, hotels and train travel so they can make informed decisions and influence a more sustainable restart to travel for their employees and productions.

Travel Managers and sustainability leads within organisations also want to be able to set and monitor achievable reductions in their business travel carbon emissions.

To support these needs of our customers around the world, CTM has developed a whole range of tools and functionality in our online booking platform, Lightning, to help businesses drive greener travel initiatives.

It’s greener on this side: CO2 per airfare segment in Lightning search results

For many years, CTM has provided dedicated carbon emissions reporting and offsetting through our dedicated Climate+ dashboard and suite of reports where you can see a breakdown of emissions by travel type, cabin class, region, cost centre and more, as well as real carbon market data on offset costs per tonne, per trip and traveller.

Analytics and reporting are great for understanding the level of impact or what key drivers are, but influencing new behaviours is a different challenge, one that requires different tools to engage employees in new ways. That’s why we’re adding CO₂ calculations at the individual airfare in Lightning search results.

 

Did you know that the emissions for a flight from Sydney to Singapore can vary as much as 19% from one business seat on one flight to another that same day? Or that the variance between the biggest emissions and lowest between flights in economy on the same route are as much as 28%?

With such a significant variance in emissions from one airline to another, travellers must be informed at the point of search and booking, which is why we’ve made it easily visible alongside the price of each fare segment for all classes.

Stat check: Understand passenger emissions by aircraft and cabin 

• 62% of passenger flights are on narrow-body craft, which contributes to over half of passenger emissions (source: RDC)
• The average global passenger emitted 90g CO₂ per RPK (revenue passenger kilometer) from January – June 2022 (RDC).
• Around 17% of passenger emissions came from premium seating in 2022 (RDC).
• Widebody economy class has the lowest emissions at around 60g CO₂ per RPK in 20222 (RDC)

Calculating business travel carbon emissions: The proof is in the data

For accurate flight CO₂ calculations, CTM knew we had to turn to aviation specialists who understood how airlines operated, how elements like seat configuration mattered but also where to source, analyse and model that data to help deliver accurate and useful CO2 calculations that were also readily available to be consumed in an API format for our products and services.

This has been accomplished in partnership with RDC Aviation, a dedicated data aggregation provider to airlines and the aviation industry that strives to make aviation data accessible.

RDC works directly with many of the world’s best-known airlines and also more recently, airports and other partners in the travel supply chain. Thanks to their granular data aggregation and analysis, we can show the different CO₂ emissions impact for economy vs premium and business cabins onboard the same flight, quickly helping travellers to understand the proportional share of emissions larger seats take up on each flight.

For flights, emissions are calculated using official data from RDC’s multi-dimensional methodology that provides more accuracy in comparison to other respected sources. RDC takes route and aircraft type plus more granular factors such as engine type, age, fuel burn, and much more to give you a detailed picture. They maintain a comprehensive database of airlines, aircraft and engine types, and seating configurations of more than 35,000 airframes which enables a more granular calculation to be made.

RDCs database also includes:

• The fuel efficiency of the aircraft type.
• The efficiency of the airline – seat capacity and load factor.
• Use of Sustainable Alternative Fuels.
• Whether the route is part of compliance or regulatory emissions programme such as CORSIA, EU ETS, etc.
• Whether the operator offsets emissions over and above that which is legally required.

CTM continues to work very closely with RDC to ensure all our routes are covered and we deliver carbon emission estimates that are as accurate as scientifically possible.

Why is the RDC methodology better?

International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) calculate fuel burn for the specific aircraft type operating a flight segment and converts the resultant fuel burn to CO2 using the standard conversion factor.

RDC calculate fuel burn in a similar way to ICAO but the significant difference is in the allocation of emissions.

RDC maintains a comprehensive database of airlines, aircraft and engine types and seating configurations of more than 35,000 airframes which enables a more granular calculation to be made.

The application of airline-specific seat configurations allows emissions to be attributed on a per seat, per passenger or per cabin/seat basis, more accurately highlighting the difference in emissions per passenger and enabling more informed customer decisions about the impact of their travel.

Stat check: Understand passenger carbon emissions by region

• Passenger flights were responsible for 85% of commercial CO2 emissions, or 785 million tonnes (Mt) of CO₂ in 2019, roughly the equivalent of emissions from worldwide shipping for passenger and freight (ICCT).
• The US, China, UK, India and UAE were the top departure countries for emissions in from Jan-Jun 2022 (RDC).
• The EU collectively follows the US with China third from Jan-Jun 2022 (RDC).

Kickstarting sustainability

We’re excited to add carbon emissions for individual travel types and segments into Lightning search results. The CTM team is committed to creating a more sustainable future for travel through a combination of innovation, strategic guidance for our customers, and investment in sustainable aviation fuels like our partnership with Delta Airlines.

If you’d like to see what the power of Lightning can bring to your travel programme, book a demo today.

 

Radiative Forcing

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has identified that aircraft emissions at altitude have a greater impact on the atmosphere due to other non-CO2 climate change effects from aviation (e.g. NOx, water vapour and contrails).

To compensate for this increased effect, it’s recommended to apply a multiplier to aircraft carbon emissions to ensure a realistic representation of the impacts. This multiplier is called Radiative Forcing Index, or RFI.

CTM follows the most reputable sources and applies their estimates. As such, CTM has taken the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) recommended RFI of 1.9.