Keeping business grounded
In both public and private sectors, organisations are seeking ways to reduce their carbon emissions.
Sustainability is embedded in Kathmandu’s business strategy, says the company’s global marketing manager, Tim Loftus. The outdoor clothing and equipment company has been trying to reduce its greenhousegas footprint, building five-star green buildings in Christchurch and Melbourne, trimming energy use, recycling and squeezing efficiencies out of its transport supply chain.
“We also decided we desperately needed to do something about offsetting our travel,” says Loftus. With a head office split between Christchurch and Melbourne, 164 stores across Australasia and ambitions for global expansion, cutting back on corporate travel hasn’t been easy.
Loftus says when they started accurately measuring the company’s carbon footprint in 2015, they discovered corporate travel accounted for about 10% of its total emissions.
“That was a big problem, so we imple- mented videoconferencing between the two head offices … Doubling down on videoconferencing as opposed to requiring everyone to get together physically was a bit of a cultural shift in the business.”
Company-wide store-manager conferences used to involve flying everyone to a central location; now, conferences are regional, so flights are shorter. When flights are taken, the company buys offsetting carbon credits through Landcare Research company Enviro-Mark: the credits support native forest restoration at the Hinewai Reserve, an ecological restoration project on Banks Peninsula.
The overall target is to cut the company’s carbon footprint by 20% by 2020, compared with 2012 levels. Loftus says cuts have been achieved, “but the reduction has been slow, much slower than we would want it to be”. And despite the efforts to reduce aviation emissions, he says only modest gains have been made, in part because the business is expanding.
“We are trying to expand to the UK, Germany and the US, and that requires travel to trade shows and face-to-face relationship-building. That’s one of the biggest challenges as we evolve … Rightly or wrongly, new business and business development are heavily reliant on relationships and handshakes.”
At the Counties Manukau District Health Board, sustainability manager Debbie Wilson says air travel accounts for 25% of the organisation’s carbon emissions. The DHB began measuring its carbon footprint in 2012, and set a goal of a 20% reduction by 2017 – a target that has already been exceeded.
“Measurement is the key first step,” Wilson says. Once people are aware of the environmental impact of their actions, they are more likely to make the behavioural changes needed to cut emissions.
More stringent financial constraints have helped reduce travel-related emissions, but “awareness-raising” about the environmental cost of flying has also helped, says Wilson. “For instance, flying business class produces three times more carbon than economy class. Having those kinds of conversations helps.”
Improved videoconferencing facilities have helped reduce corporate travel and have even been used as a substitute for face-to-face meetings within Auckland city, avoiding trips across town.
Wilson says the organisation has not yet moved to offset all corporate flights, but she thinks that will happen. “I’m sure it will eventually be seen as part of the cost of travel.”
She has cut down on her own flying, including opting to present at a recent Melbourne conference via video link. She was glad to be able to avoid the emissions and the time-consuming travel, but inability to receive feedback and cues from the audience was a disadvantage. When she does have to fly, she buys carbon offsets.
Videoconferencing has helped reduce corporate travel and has even been used as a substitute for face-to-face meetings in the same city.
use a huge amount of fuel – it takes around 100,000 litres to fly from Auckland to Los Angeles – and no one has been able to come up with a steady supply of biofuel that could meet the demand.
Last year, Air New Zealand and Virgin Australia called for proposals from the biofuel sector for the supply of 20 million litres by 2020. They heard from 30 companies, but Luxon says none could meet the requirement, although Air New Zealand’s head of sustainability, Lisa Daniell, is continuing to work with two of them. The airline is also talking to Z Energy, the fuel company behind a new Auckland plant that makes biofuel from tallow, a waste product from the meat industry.
Luxon lived for years in the US when vast tracts of the Midwest were turned over to corn production for ethanol, so he is well aware of the unintended consequences of biofuels and their potential to displace food production. In the long term, he thinks, woody biomass from forestry waste is the most likely option for New Zealand biofuel development, “but, again, there is no scalability to any of those efforts”.
The development of a sustainable biofuels supply hasn’t been helped by the fracking boom in the US, which has kept the price of oil low and made it harder for alternative fuels to compete, he says.
In October, Qantas announced a major biofuels push, declaring that its Los Angeles-based aircraft will be powered by biofuel from 2020. Over the next 10 years, the Australian airline will buy 30 million litres of fuel from US bioenergy company SG Preston, to be used on flights from LA to Australia. The fuel will be 50% renewable from non-food-plant oils, blended with normal jet fuel, and will emit half the CO 2 emissions.
Meanwhile, the Queensland Government has announced that Brisbane Airport will become a hub for aviation biofuel: in a two-year trial, a partnership between Virgin Australia and US biofuel company Gevo, “biojet” will be delivered through the airport’s normal fuel-supply infrastructure. The fuel, made from sugarcane waste, molasses, wood waste and agave, will initially be imported from the US, but Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is pushing for the development of a local biofuel sector and the state government has published a “Biofutures Roadmap”, which envisages a A$1 billion ($1.12 billion) biofuel, bioplastic and biochemical industry over the next decade.
BATTERY CHARGERS
What about battery technology? Could it revolutionise flying in the way it is transforming the car industry? Low-cost UK airline EasyJet recently announced a push towards electric battery-powered commercial planes for short distances, which it says could be in the air within the next 10 to 20 years. It has partnered with US start-up Wright Electric, which says it will build a plane capable of flying 335km and carrying 220 passengers.
EasyJet chief executive Carolyn McCall was quoted as saying she could see “a future without jet fuel … it is now more a matter of when, not if, a short-haul electric plane will fly”.
And Seattle start-up Zunum Aero – backed by Boeing and JetBlue – recently announced plans to build a small hybridelectric commuter plane capable of carrying 12 passengers. It has longer-term ambitions to develop a 50-seat electric aircraft that can fly 1000km.
Such developments have piqued Luxon’s interest, particularly as Air New Zealand flies
“I have gone through every single proposal and there is not an example in the world where we have scalable biofuels.”
so many short-haul domestic routes.
“It’s very nascent, very emergent technology,” he says. “We have been reached out to in just the past two months by people who could do electric planes. And we are in a better position to explore it because New Zealand has primarily renewable energy, and we are also unique because we fly small planes – everything from 350 seats down to 50-seaters. If we could move the [regional] turboprop fleet to fully electric planes, that could be a technology breakthrough that could really work for us.”
OFFSET PROGRAMMES
But the prospect of a techno-fix for aviation’s emissions is still a long way off. In the meantime, the only way to reduce the impact of flying on the climate is by offsetting – paying someone else to reduce emissions by, say, planting a forest or building a windfarm or solar array.
Airlines offer offset programmes, but few customers take up the option. Jetstar New Zealand says 3-8% of customers tick the offsetting box when buying a ticket online: the money goes to projects such as rainforest protection in Papua New Guinea and wildfire prevention in the West Australian savannah.
Luxon says the uptake of Air New Zealand’s offsets – the money from which goes to projects run by the Native Forest Restoration Trust – has increased since it took a leaf from the behavioural economics textbooks and elevated the profile of its offsetting option on its online booking site. In September, customers offset 10,000 journeys, compared with only 100 in September last year. Luxon also wants to see more corporate travellers ticking the offset box.
But the era of untrammelled growth in aviation emissions is almost over. For years, international aviation and shipping were left out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change because they were not easily managed within individual countries’ carbon targets. The International Civil Aviation Organisation and International Maritime Organisation were given the job of figuring out how the respective sectors would control their emissions, but little progress was made.
The 2015 Paris climate agreement also excluded the two sectors. But in October 2016, a new global agreement was struck to develop a scheme to ensure that future growth in international flights will be carbon-neutral. From the baseline year of 2020, airlines that comply with the scheme – which will be voluntary until 2026 – will have to offset any increase in emissions.
The agreement followed mounting pressure on airlines to do something about their contribution to climate change, says IATA chief economist Brian Pearce, who also sits on Air New Zealand’s sustainability advisory panel. The European Union has been moving to include international airlines flying to European airports in the region’s emissions-trading scheme, and opposition to a third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport has focused on the impact that the increase in air traffic would have on the UK’s strict carbon budget.
“There was a growing realisation from the industry that it really needed to get on the front foot,” says Pearce. “The constraints on the industry were growing, and it made sense to have a global scheme that didn’t have competitive distortions.”
The upshot of the deal will be a major increase in demand for carbon credits to offset the expected growth in emissions. Pearce says airline ticket prices will go up as a result of the global deal. “The extent of increase will depend on how much it costs to [buy] carbon offsets, but most calculations suggest there may be a 1-2% increase on ticket prices.” Given that the global price of carbon is widely tipped to rise substantially in coming decades, however, it seems reasonable to assume that impost will increase.
The global offsetting scheme is called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (Corsia). Daniell says airlines representing 90% of international air traffic have already agreed to enter the scheme during its pilot and voluntary stages. Measurement and verification processes are being developed, but decisions are yet to be made about the type of carbon credits that airlines will be able to use to defray their emissions above the 2020 baseline.
Depending on the price of carbon, the annual cost to Air New Zealand could be $10-20 million “easily”, Luxon says. “So it’s a big commitment, but you have to do it, and you want to do it and it’s the right thing to do.
“Sometimes we can intellectualise these things, and it might be imperfect and messy at the beginning, but the big thing is we actually are going to make a start and learn by doing. We have declared the goal, and now we have to work out how we are going to do it. But you can’t socialise the cost and commercialise the benefit.”
He says Air New Zealand would prefer to buy its offsets from New Zealand programmes, particularly those that fund the regeneration of native bush and not only soak up carbon but also have benefits for soil conservation, water quality, biodiversity
Offsetting reduces the impact of flying on the climate by paying someone to, say, plant a forest or build a windfarm or solar array.
and local communities. But there are difficulties: it’s hard to find enough property owners willing to turn large enough areas of unproductive land over to natives, which are slower-growing than exotics such as pine and therefore generate less income from carbon credits.
“We have an opportunity to put all that money into New Zealand if we can. But otherwise we will have to assemble it from quality [schemes] offshore,” he says.
GREEN GLOBETROTTING
In the longer term, the international aviation industry has a goal of halving emissions by 2050 compared with 2005 levels. By then, says Luxon, it’s hoped that developments in fuel technology, aircraft design and electric planes will be able to deliver those reductions.
So, can we look forward to a future of clean, green globetrotting? Not necessarily. Lobby groups such as the Europe’s Transport & Environment argue that the notion of “sustainable” flying is a myth. “Talk of flying green and the dawn of sustainable aviation is misleading and misplaced,” wrote the group’s aviation expert, Andrew Murphy, in an article highlighting the dubious history of international carbon credits, which have often been found to lack integrity.
“Even if offsetting can be made to work, it can only ever be a temporary solution as the Paris Agreement requires all sectors and all states to reduce their emissions, not just pay others to reduce theirs.”
Also, the global Corsia scheme deals only with CO2 emissions, not the other climatedamaging gases emitted by aircraft.
Airline ticket prices will go up as a result of the global offsetting deal: most calculations suggest there may be a 1-2% increase.
A 2015 report to the European Parliament also advised that merely stabilising aviation emissions at 2020 levels is “clearly not enough”, and that by 2050 the sector’s CO2 emissions needed to be 41% below 2005 levels to meet global climate goals. If aviation’s non-CO2 gases were also taken into account, “those targets would need to be even more stringent”.
And some say the aviation sector’s longterm ambitions for a massive scale-up of biofuels should be treated with caution. The International Coalition for Sustainable Aviation – an alliance that includes groups such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Transport & Environment and the Environmental Defence Fund – says the strategy overstates the environmental benefits of biofuels and understates the risk that they could trigger food insecurity and human rights violations if customary land users are squeezed out to make way for fuel crops.
DOWN TO EARTH
For some climate-conscious citizens, there’s only one solution to the problem of air travel and its contribution to global warming and that is to stay on the ground.
UK climate scientist Kevin Anderson
depicts it as a matter of climate justice: given that there is a finite budget on how much carbon can be dumped into the atmosphere without pushing the temperature above the 2°C guardrail – let alone the more ambitious goal of a 1.5°C limit – every time someone takes a carbon-spewing flight, “someone else has to reduce their emissions to compensate”.
“Given that the wealthy in society are the principal drivers of increased aviation, it is the poorer communities that are essentially forced to pay this compensation,” says Anderson. “When we decide to fly to another essential climate-change conference, undertake field work or visit family, we are telling poorer communities to cut
back on the energy they use to provide basic needs.”
Like Anderson, US scientist Peter Kalmus is part of a group called Climate Scientists Who Don’t Fly. In a recent book called Being the Change, he describes how he has reduced his personal carbon footprint from 20 tonnes a year to two, partly by deciding to stop flying to scientific conferences. He writes of the cognitive dissonance he experienced as his knowledge of climate change deepened, but he continued to live a high-carbon lifestyle with a greenhouse-gas footprint dominated by flying. One of the triggers for change was imagining his kids asking him in the future: “Dad, how could you keep flying around the world giving 20-minute presentations on your research when you knew the impact?”
As for me and my share of that gigantic carbon footprint from just one year of flying, I haven’t followed Anderson and Kalmus’s path. For now, offsets help assuage the guilt. As for avoiding frivolous flying, it helps that I’m happier to go tramping in the hills than hopping over to Sydney to go shopping. But the online carbon calculator has spoken and shattered my climate-conscious halo. From now on, I will think before I fly.
One of the triggers for change was imagining his kids asking him in the future: “Dad, how could you keep flying around the world when you knew the impact?”