Change management needed to greening corporate travel

Changing our behaviours to reduce our carbon footprint is a key and sometimes difficult challenge for us individuals and businesses. Air travel represents 2% of the world's total CO2 emissions, which may seem insignificant at first but is in fact a lot if you compare it with cleaner means of travelling. As an indication The Impact of Tourism on Climate Change (Peeters, 2007) reveals that European tourists use air travel for 20% of their trips, which yet accounts for 75% of the total tourism transport CO2 emissions (interesting to note the Pareto principles applies here).

The Green Travel Summit held on 23-24 March in California, came out with the top 10 challenges to greening corporate travel, of which 6 are directly related to change management issues, as highlighted below:

1. Where to begin

2. Perception vs reality regarding costs

3. Overcoming resistance to change

4. Buy in from senior management

5. ROI*

6. Securing budget

7. Reporting standards and metrics*

8. Green washing: truth vs fiction

9. Buy in from both the planner and the supplier

10. Communicating and educating all relative stakeholders

* to me directly related to change management as measuring and communicating successes and benefits is a key component

More details here