Dozens of companies boasting green credentials fail to address business flight emissions

The latest Travel Smart rankings published by Transport & Environment shows that hundreds of the World’s biggest companies are failing to set meaningful targets for reducing the environmental impact of their business air travel.

Travel Smart is a global campaign which aims to get companies to reduce business flying emissions to half of their pre-Covid levels by 2025 or sooner.

The main takeaway is that 85% of global companies don’t have plans to reduce corporate flying emissions, despite the fact that many consider themselves to be environmentally responsible.

The report looks at 322 of the biggest firms in the US, Europe and India, awarding (or deducting) points based on ten indicators. For example,  under the  ‘Commitment’ indicator, a company would be given 1.5 points for having an emissions reduction target specific to air travel, 1 point if it is a more general business travel target, 0.5 points for a broad corporate target and no points for having no target. 

The top ten best scorers were all European companies, with ABN Amro from the Netherlands topping the list.  Volkswagen, KPMG and Johnson & Johnson are the worst companies for emissions and none have a target for reducing them.

The report found most companies (76%) report business travel emissions but have made no commitment to reducing them, while 40 companies lead the way by reporting all greenhouse gas emissions associated with corporate flights. 

It also revealed that if the ten worst most polluting companies reduced their emissions by 50%  this would go halfway to achieving the global target of -50% in corporate air travel emissions by 2025.

Denise Auclair, corporate travel manager at Transport & Environment, said: ‘Corporates are turning a blind eye to the harms done by flying for work. Most companies are taking little to no action on business flying, which renders any other travel targets meaningless in the context of tackling climate change. Only few frontrunners align with science by reporting non-CO2 emissions – the hidden part of the iceberg of aviation’s full climate impact’.