BT4Europe, the European Network of Business Travel Associations, has stepped up its call for “swift action” to help make corporate travel greener during meetings with EU officials.
Patrick Diemer, the group’s chair, has been in Brussels this week to push forward BT4Europe’s demands for “urgent and significant steps to be taken to improve access to standardised, accurate and comparable data on the CO2 impact of business travel”.
BT4Europe, which is made up of 13 business travel associations around Europe and was set up earlier this year, originally made their case for a standardised method of measuring carbon emissions in a paper published in September.
The group has also made similar points in its submission to the European Commission’s CountEmissionsEU consultation, which closed last week. This EU initiative aims to create a “common framework” to calculate and report transport-related greenhouse gas emissions.
“A consistent measure of carbon emissions from business travel is urgently needed, which at the moment is simply not available,” added Diemer.
“To green business travel we must all work together to ensure the CO2 footprint of business travel options become as important as price, customers have a right to CO2 information and CountEmissionsEU is an opportunity to set a unified standard for CO2 emission calculations.
“We must start immediately to green business travel. Hence, we should start with CO2 information as soon as possible.”
Diemer is also meeting other EU officials to discuss the forthcoming EU’s multimodal digital mobility strategy, which is seeking to better integrate public transport and rail services as part of the EU Green Deal to make the continent more sustainable.
Fuente: businesstravelnewseurope.com