Unpacking Scope 3: Category 6 – The carbon cost of business travel

GHG Scope 3 Upstream activites | Category 6 – Business travel

Business travel plays a vital role in many organisations from client meetings to conferences and project work. But every flight, train journey, hotel stay and taxi ride carries a carbon impact that extends beyond the travel budget. Scope 3 Category 6 captures these GHG emissions so businesses can make smarter, more sustainable choices.

What’s included?

Category 6 covers all work-related travel paid for by your company but not operated by you. This includes:

• Flights
• Rail travel
• Hotels and accommodation
• Rental cars
• Ride-hailing services
• Ferries and coaches

Why it matters

Business travel can be a surprisingly large part of an organisation’s footprint — especially for consulting, professional services, tech or global companies, or any organisation that relies on sales people travelling to attend networking events or prospect clients’ meetings.

Understanding these emissions helps you:

• Identify frequent travel routes
• Shift to lower-carbon travel options
• Build fair and effective travel policies
• Reduce unnecessary or duplicated trips

How to manage it

• Partner with travel providers who offer emissions data
• Encourage rail over air for short routes
• Introduce virtual meeting defaults
• Track hotel energy ratings

Materiality assessment – the ESOS case

You should determine what types of business travel are relevant to your business and its stakeholders. For example, for the purpose of ESOS reporting – which affects large enterprises – only a few elements are deemed to be material, and only within well defined geographic boundaries.

ESOS participants are required to include transport-related energy where the organisation is supplied with the fuel for business purposes. However, this does not apply where you procure a transportation service that includes an indirect payment for the fuel consumption (e.g. a taxi or a flight ticket).

To comply with ESOS, energy consumed for the purposes of transport means energy used by a road going vehicle, a vessel, an aircraft or a train:

• ‘aircraft’ means a self-propelled machine that can move through the air other than against the earth’s surface
• ‘road going vehicle’ means any vehicle in respect of which a vehicle licence is required under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994 or which is an exempt vehicle under that Act
• ‘train’ has the meaning given in section 83 of the Railways Act 1993
• ‘vessel’ means any boat or ship which is self-propelled and operates in or under water

A participant’s energy consumption includes energy consumed for the purposes of transport by an aircraft or a vessel during any journey which starts, ends, or both starts and ends within the UK. For the purposes of ESOS, the definition of a ‘journey’ for both aircraft and sea vessels is the travel which takes place between the departure from one point, and arrival at the next point.

A participant may elect to include:

• energy consumed for the purposes of transport by an aircraft or a vessel, during a journey which both starts, and ends, outside the UK
• energy consumed outside the UK for the purposes of transport by a road going vehicle or a train

In your calculation of your total energy consumption, include fuel used in:

• company cars on business use
• fleet vehicles which you operate on business use
• personal or hire cars on business use (the sa called “grey fleet”, for which employeers and managers claim mileage expenses)
• private jets, fleet aircraft, trains, ships or drilling platforms which you operate

In your calculation of your total energy consumption, do not include fuel associated with:

• train travel of your employees where you do not operate the train
• flights your employees take where you do not operate the aircraft
• taxi journeys your employees take where you do not operate the taxi firm
• transportation of goods where you subcontract a firm or self-employed individual to undertake this work for you (this fuel will be included in the subcontractor’s total energy consumption calculation if they qualify for ESOS)

Key takeaway

Business travel will never disappear, but with the right data and policies it can become far more climate-efficient!