Julien Etchanchu, Senior Director, Sustainability Consulting
When it comes to sustainability, there are countless ways to act, making it easy to wonder which actions can have the biggest impact.
World Earth Day (April 22), is a perfect opportunity to reflect on a fundamental concept in sustainability: orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude refer to the varying levels of impact our actions can have on the environment. This concept, often misunderstood or overlooked, is key to making a real difference in fighting climate change both in business travel and our daily lives. So, let’s dive in:
Business travel: Shifting the focus toward long-haul flights and travel volumes
For large companies, air travel makes up 90% of business travel emissions on average, with about two-thirds of this coming from long-haul flights. This means roughly 50-60% of total business travel-related emissions are generated from long-distance flights alone. As such, focusing on sustainability initiatives like renting an electric car or choosing a certified hotel is beneficial, but it’s easy to see that the overall impact will be limited.
For example, to “offset” a single Paris-Sydney round-trip flight in business class (~12 tons of CO2) you would have to:
- Give up about 50 Paris-Berlin round-trip flights in economy class
- OR replace 500 standard rental cars with electric ones across a 190-mile journey
This depicts how impactful it is to reduce long-haul flights within your travel program.
Similarly, even policies that heavily promote train travel can overlook an essential element: global volume increase. Trains are currently the most eco-friendly way to travel, and many companies are shifting market share from air to rail where possible. While that is the right thing to do, we often note an increase of long-haul flights at the same time, essentially canceling out the CO2 savings from train travel. While promoting electric cars or trains in your travel policy is important, the main priority should still be to cut down on air travel emissions (by managing volume and selecting the best airlines) especially from long-haul flights.
Personal life: Prioritizing transport and eating habits
Did you know the average American emits approximately 22 tons of CO2 per year? According to Carbone4 more than half of these emissions come from transportation (cars and planes) and food. Other sources like clothing, housing, and furniture are certainly significant too, especially heating, but still fall quite far behind.
On an individual level, the two most impactful actions are eating less meat and cutting down on car and plane use. For example, if each person were to adopt a sustainable diet (following their country’s recommended guidelines, which include Western nations reducing meat consumption and increasing their consumption of plants), this alone could reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by approximately 30%. The advantage of orders of magnitude is that they are, by definition, factual and clarify ideas: While unplugging your iPhone charger when you’re not using it or recycling is good, these actions have a much smaller impact on your carbon footprint.
Knowing about orders of magnitude will also help you be more informed. Next time your neighbors tell you that they are going to the Maldives and that they can allow themselves this luxury as they recycle daily, you can point out to them that their flight is equivalent to 15 years of waste reduction and that they’ll have a lot more recycling to do to ‘compensate’ for their flight.
So does this mean small actions are useless?
On one hand, small actions definitely have their place. Studies have shown that the ripple effect is powerful—explaining to your travelers why electric cars are better for the environment might inspire them to buy one, and then influence their friends and family to do the same. Change always starts with just a handful of people. Plus, small actions can also benefit other areas of sustainability beyond CO2 that are sometimes overlooked. For example, choosing a hotel committed to sustainability might not significantly reduce your emissions, but it can contribute to other important environmental factors like reducing your water usage and waste, and even impact biodiversity.
On the other hand, small actions become questionable, even harmful, as soon as they become the sole action taken, and allow us to ignore essential measures (whether we are conscious of this or not). Take airlines for example: Should they take the initiative to recycle plastic cups used on board? Yes. Should they widely communicate on this subject? Likely, not and there are other far greater steps they may be taking to influence the impact of their operations that their messaging should be focused on. In the context of the EU Green Claims Directive and other pieces of legislations tackling communication and greenwashing, this will become more and more of a focus in the near future.
Returning to your business travel program: a travel policy that favors trains or electric cars, as we’ve seen, won’t necessarily be coupled with a strategy focused on long-haul flights, which could hinder your impact on emissions reduction. This all comes back to the lack of consideration of orders of magnitude, a cognitive bias often raised by climate specialists. At the heart of this bias is people’s inability to grasp or visualize the actual quantities of emissions at stake. Mélusine Boon-Falleur, a doctor of cognitive science explains that “the higher the quantities, the less we’ll really understand or be able to visualize this quantity. If I say that aviation emits 1 million tons of carbon or even 1 billion tons of carbon, your brain will always register that it’s going to be a ‘lot’.” In this vein and to stick to our earlier example: in a travel program, reducing long-haul flights on key routes may reduce your global footprint by 5% for instance, while shifting from air to rail may only account for 0.5%. While both actions have an impact and should be put in place, the priority nonetheless remains with long-haul flights.
Once you understand orders of magnitude, you can put your effort toward key areas that will have the most meaningful impact. In this context, small gestures will be useful but only because their impact will be properly understood and actions with a bigger impact will be prioritized.
At Advito, we’ve partnered with Carbone4 to provide MyCO2 interactive sustainability workshops that educate employees on the importance of taking action to mitigate climate change, how to calculate their own carbon footprint, and how they can make changes in their day-to-day to reduce their impact on the environment. At the core of this workshop are discussions around these orders of magnitude so that attendees can understand which changes in their own behavior will have the greatest impact. Want to learn more about setting up a workshop for your company? Contact our team to learn more!