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AIA

Travel Hub tool saves carbon and cash

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30th Sep 2011
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The acounting profession and business community are still reluctant to get to grips on carbon accounting and sustainability issues, but are beginning to come around according to one pioneer in the field.

Paul Adderley is the founder of Edinburgh-based Sustainable Opportunity Solutions, a consultancy that has come up with an online software application for modelling the costs and carbon use of business travel.

Travel Hub is an online journey planner that helps the business compare the time and cost of different means of travel to choose the one that best suits their priorities at the time. Productivity, costs and carbon impact are all adversely affected by business travel, but the art is really how to get the balance right, not only to save energy, but to maximise profits and even retain jobs, according to Adderley.

Travel Hub has been adopted by Natural England and helped the conservation body quantify the financial savings from its carbon reduction plan. Using the software to model what the savings going back 45 months, the Travel Hub analysis showed Natural England had cut carbon emissions by 41.5%, equivalent to 1,140 tonnes of CO2 emissions. The savings were realised by an 80% overall reduction in travel, including switching where possible from car to rail travel. Over the period of the study, the efficiency savings amounted to £2.1m, based on £1,800 per tonne of carbon saved, plus £700,000 from improved staff productivity and reduced subsistence costs.

Paul Hinds who heads sustainability at Natural England, said the SOS tool “helped us to robustly connect our carbon reduction achievements to the financial benefits across our diverse organisation”.

Smaller businesses can be attracted to carbon reduction if it can be shown to make them more competitive rather than being “a tree hugging, environmental message” that ‘I can't grow’”, Adderley said.

“Carbon management through TravelHub is not a cost. It is simply the application of an analysis tool that gives the full cost and carbon impact on door-to-door business travel,” Adderley said. “This in turn allows for a change in technology (more tele/video conferencing) and behaviour (train rather than car) to cut the volatility of cost impacts on profit.

"I gave a talk to the ICAEW recently and where three years ago some members were rather prickly about carbon accounting, there is increasing realisation that a change in technology and behaviour reduces future energy price rises.”

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