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Sustainability will not drop on Corp Agenda
Any fears that sustainability might fall off travel managers' agenda amid the ongoing pandemic appear to be unfounded. While interest – and positive actions – around sustainability was gaining momentum 12 years ago, a global recession triggered in 2008 saw many corporates park efforts to mitigate their environmental impact. There have been fears that the Covid-19 pandemic could prompt a similar scenario.
In the years since that economic turmoil, however, the urgent need to prevent further damage to our planet has become even more acutely obvious and, for the most part, its populous is listening to the irrefutable evidence. Indeed, in 2018 and 2019, teenager Greta Thunberg became a flagbearer for tackling climate change while the idea of ‘flygskam’, or flight shaming, emerged from Scandinavia amid a shift from air to rail travel within the region.
There was barely a business travel conference in 2019 where sustainability did not prominently feature and at the Business Travel Show in London in February this year, as Covid-19 crept across the globe, every buyer and supplier was adamant sustainability was no longer something that could be set aside, no matter what came along.
The temporary halt of business travel is enabling corporates to revisit travel policies and programmes and build sustainability in from the ground up. And there has of course been the side effect that carbon emissions from business travel have plummeted.
Sustainability is about the balance between people, planet and profit. It’s about carbon impact, but also ethics, wellbeing and duty of care. When companies consider all these together they achieve massive increase in value, not just in share price but in value to the organisation, to employees and to customers.
Education is so important. It’s the only way to make it work.
We all need to act now.”
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