Engaged audience

COMPANY: AstraZeneca is a UK-headquartered pharmaceutical company operating in more than 100 markets worldwide. It was Highly Commended in the Achievement in Sustainability – Managed Travel Programme category at the BTN Group’s Business Travel Sustainability Awards Europe earlier this year.

TRAVEL-RELATED SUSTAINABILITY COMMITMENTS: Reduce Scope 3 GHG emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and by 90 per cent by 2045 compared to a 2019 baseline.

NUMBER OF TRAVELLERS: The company has 90,000 employees, of which around 60,000 travel.

KEY SUSTAINABILITY ACTIONS:
• Consolidated its emissions data and built reporting dashboard
• Established changes to core travel guidelines to support carbon reduction efforts
• Deployed comprehensive internal communications campaign

The emissions from AstraZeneca’s business travel activity were just two per cent of its overall carbon footprint in 2023 but it is nevertheless a key area of focus for the company’s wider Ambition Carbon Zero plan.

“Travel is only a fraction of our overall emissions but that doesn’t make our reduction efforts any less supported [by senior leaders] or any less emotive,” says Kerrie Henshaw-Cox, the company’s associate director of business travel.

Among AstraZeneca’s environmental goals is the halving of its scope 3 emissions, including business travel, by 2030, and to cut them by 90 per cent by 2045 against a 2019 baseline.

Robert Williams, director of sustainable procurement at AstraZeneca, stresses the significance of setting absolute reduction targets. “We have seen some suppliers say they’ll reduce emissions per full-time employee – that’s an intensity goal and, frankly, not what the planet needs. We’ve set absolute reduction targets and they’re far more challenging but the travel team has a lot of levers it can pull on.”

To ensure the company achieves those targets it convened a cross-functional steering committee which included representation from business travel. Working with colleagues in sustainable procurement and analytics, it was tasked with establishing the reporting and reduction of AstraZeneca’s air travel emissions from business travel.

“A company tonnage cap was agreed and endorsed by the senior executive team, and that figure was allocated across business units”

Putting a cap on carbon

To achieve meaningful progress, the company decided to implement a cap on carbon emissions from its air travel globally in 2023, with flying contributing by far the largest proportion of its travel emissions and also having the most readily available data.

“A company tonnage cap was agreed and endorsed by the senior executive team, and that figure was allocated across business units,” says Henshaw-Cox. “Initially it was challenged by some people – ‘we’re a growing business’, ‘we’ve got more employees’, ‘we need to travel more’. But we were confident we could do it and the executive team fully supported us. They agreed it’s not just about cutting travelling but about how we travel.”

From here, the team quickly recognised the need to consolidate its data from two TMC partners – one in China and another for the rest of the world – and to measure emissions using a consistent methodology. Emissions data presented by suppliers, its TMCs and OBT varied, often significantly, it observed.

“Early on we saw inconsistent emissions reporting and data sources, incomplete profiles and, in particular, challenges with the mapping of those [guests] we fly to meetings,” says Henshaw-Cox.

The decision was therefore taken to establish its own methodology, using DEFRA calculations, that was based on miles flown by class of travel and additionally includes a radiative forcing multiplier.

It then removed all emissions figures from its booking tool and instead built a single reference source based on its new methodology that documents the emissions on every route the company flies.

“We made that decision because we didn't want to confuse travellers who were seeing emissions figures in our OBT – and quoting them during approvals – which didn’t ultimately match what we reported,” says Denise Bonner, AstraZeneca’s EMEA travel manager.

“We refer all travellers to our calculator and discourage them from using any other reference document so that they’re properly informed when planning travel and that it’s reflected in our reporting.”

Whilst travellers initially needed to refer to the document and manually input the emissions associated with a planned trip, the company began piloting earlier this year an approvals app in which that process is now automated.

“The emissions reporting dashboard helps you see where you are against your target at that moment in time”

Presenting the numbers

With a carbon cap, consolidated data and a new emissions methodology in place, AstraZeneca then needed a means of meaningfully reporting on its air emissions.

That came in the shape of a bespoke ‘CFO Dashboard’ that was built inhouse and tracks the company’s emissions from air travel towards the annual cap it had set, showing both flown and ticketed trips. Access was reserved for the senior executive team and business leaders, with emissions viewable by business unit and down to individual traveller level. It was an instant hit.

“The dashboard helps you see where you are against your target at that moment in time,” Henshaw-Cox explains. “So as a leader you can look at it and see, for example, that you could have two more people take transatlantic trips this year or four people travel in Europe. ‘What should I let my team do?’. We had amazing feedback. Demand for access to it has grown exponentially, with more and more individuals wanting to understand how their next trip will impact their target.”

Guidelines in place

The company also set about establishing three core guidelines that would steer travellers towards lower emissions trips – or dissuade them from travelling at all. These were the key levers used to change behaviour and cut emissions.

Firstly, it wanted employees to avoid taking short trips. Like many companies, AstraZeneca is now advising against one-day trips and, as an alternative, rolling-up multiple meetings in a single, longer trip, thus minimising travel emissions.

Secondly, it asks travellers to take the train where possible – particularly within Europe and Japan – with a directive in some markets to travel by train rather than air when a journey can be completed in under four hours.

Lastly, it asks travellers to ‘fly more sustainably’ by opting to travel on newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft as highlighted in its online booking tool.

With all the pieces of the jigsaw in place, the company embarked upon a comprehensive communications campaign. “The success of it all depended on changing the mindset of how and why we travel,” says Henshaw-Cox. “We wanted to educate employees to make smart and sustainable decisions when booking travel whilst still enabling them to achieve their objectives.”

Spreading the word

Its carefully orchestrated comms plan, dubbed Every Mile Matters, included regular educational sessions with travellers, a new intranet page featuring guidance on reducing business travel, a series of posts from senior business leaders endorsing the campaign, assets such as email signatures that enable travellers to show their commitment to travelling more lightly, and pop-up messaging in its booking tool to steer employees towards airlines with more efficient aircraft and hotels with higher sustainability ratings.

Even though the company was not yet including hotel emissions in its reporting it wanted to encourage a shift in mindset. “When the time comes that we do report accommodation emissions, the behaviour will already be embedded and it will be second nature [to book more sustainable options],” says Henshaw-Cox.

“The travel team was at the core of the campaign, answering travellers’ questions and keeping up the dialogue,” she adds. “We collaborated with internal comms teams around the globe to provide messaging that was timely, relevant and in multiple languages.” The campaign was so successful that it was continued into 2024.

Among other steps, the company also elevated its supplier engagement by hosting workshops and encouraging its high-volume partners to commit to SBTi, EcoVadis and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) reporting.

“We want to have 90 per cent of travel partners achieve sustainability goals through evidence-based ratings,” says Henshaw-Cox. “Our primary focus is air but we are also working with accommodation and car companies. Airlines have really appreciated our approach and it’s led to some rewarding conversations.”

The company’s RFPs also now include more sustainability questions asking for evidence of suppliers’ CSR policies and carbon reduction initiatives.

The outcome

AstraZeneca’s efforts were well rewarded. The number of one-day or short trips taken in 2023 fell from 43 per cent of all short-haul trips to 31 per cent, while rail’s share of trips where it competes with air increased from 31 per cent in 2019 to 65 per cent last year.

On some of the company’s top European routes, including Barcelona-Madrid and Rome-Milan, rail now accounts for more than 90 per cent of all trips. Meanwhile, for long-haul travel, the proportion of business trips taken by what AstraZeneca identifies as inefficient aircraft fell from 39 per cent to 19 per cent.

Those changes meant that, although its 2023 air travel emissions increased 6.5 per cent from 2022 when travel was still recovering post-Covid, the figure was well down on its 2019 baseline and, significantly, was 14 per cent below the tonnage cap that had been set for air travel emissions in 2023.

“The 50 per cent target that we have for 2030… we are already there on business travel,” says Henshaw-Cox. “We’ve achieved a lot already and we’re bringing travellers along with us and starting to make a difference. Our challenge will be to maintain that in a growing organisation where the percentage of travellers to employees is also increasing.”

What next for AstraZeneca’s travel programme? Henshaw-Cox says that although the company steers its travellers towards more efficient aircraft, those emissions savings aren’t yet reflected in its reporting.

“We’re not necessarily going to change our methodology but I do think we could be using the more granular information that is now available to us,” she says.

And noting that its achievements to date have centred primarily on reporting and reducing its air travel emissions, the company now has other areas squarely in its sights, including accommodation and ground transportation.