• We want to make our travel more sustainable, as travel produced roughly 38,5001 tCO2₂e in 2019 which was 16% of our total carbon footprint. Of that, business travel emissions were 19,000 tCO₂e and of that 94% was flights. There was a further 19,400 tCO₂e of emissions from student flights in 2019/20, estimated.[1]
• In our Sustainability Strategy 2021-2026, Imperial College committed to develop a Sustainable Travel Policy and that our measure of progress will be a reduction in carbon emissions from air travel by 25% by 2026 against the baseline year 2017–18 (tonnes of CO₂e per person per year).
• We have focused on air travel in the first instance due to the potential high impact this can have on our carbon emissions.
• We have also received asks from the Imperial community (both staff and students) for such policy, which has been further demonstrated by the recent all staff and student sustainability survey undertaken in May/June.
• Travel is just one of our current priority areas for sustainability. Learn more about what the College is focusing on here.

[1] Estimation of Carbon Footprint from Business Travel at Imperial College London, Shirin Ermis, Supervisors: Paul Lickiss, Jem Woods, and Anna Korre, September 9, 2021 (UROPS project)

• A Sustainable Travel Working Group was established, reporting to the Sustainability Strategy Committee, to develop policies and proposals to reduce the College’s carbon footprint from travel, as part of delivering the Sustainability Strategy.
• The working group is made up academics, campus services operational staff, trade union and professional services staff representatives across the College.
• Other key stakeholders were engaged and consulted with such as the Students Union, central communications, Research Office, and HR representatives.
• Alongside the working group, we undertook workshops where senior academics, ECRs and administrative staff could provide feedback, voice concerns, and offer inputs to help shape the proposed policy into something ambitious but realistic.
• We put out an all staff and student survey on sustainability and specifically on travel to baseline perceptions and provide insights.

• Work is taking place to encourage and support more active travel for staff and students when commuting to campus, and College will work with the Imperial College Union to consider the options available to reduce the carbon footprint from student travel.
• The Sustainable Travel Working Group have focused on air travel initially due to its high impact, but the remit of the group includes active travel.
• We know that many in our community may wish to find alternative means of transport to campus rather than relying solely on public transport. Wherever possible, we encourage and aim to support staff and students in making their transport to campus - and across London - more active. Find more via our Active Travel webpages on the opportunities to find a way that is best for yourself, your health and the environment.

• We recognise the challenges of offsetting as there are not yet established market standards for quality schemes. Offsetting can have a role to play in reaching net zero for some residual emissions but reducing emissions must always be a priority.
• We are not seeking to procure a further offsetting scheme for business travel at the current time, but the Sustainable Travel Working Group will review this position should the evidence and quality of schemes in the market improve. We will continually reassess what is defined as ‘unavoidable’ emissions as new technologies become available.
• If an individual Faculty or Department wish to engage in a verifiable offset scheme, this must be reviewed by a sub-set of the Sustainable Travel Working Group for approval before purchase and implementation, to ensure that it meets standards that are acceptable to the College.
• We will continue to use Profs Who Fly where offsetting is required by funders.

• The term climate conscious travel was developed by University of Edinburgh.
• The approach considers environmental, social, and economic impacts associated with travel and weights them against the expected benefits.
• Climate conscious travel is:
• Choosing not to travel when virtual collaboration tools will adequately fulfil the purpose of travel.
• Being aware of the environmental impacts of travel and choosing a method of travel that reduces these (e.g., by train rather than plane or not upgrading to a higher flight class than necessary)
• This policy is to enable considered travel and focus on obtaining maximum benefit from a reduced volume of travel through emphasis of quality over quantity.

• We understand that with some funding the main consideration is cost and don’t account for low carbon travel routes.
• Where external partners (e.g., funding bodies like UKRI and Wellcome Trust) allow, the College encourages staff and students to incorporate the features of sustainable business travel policy when designing research projects and applying for funding.
• To support the climate conscious travel approach, the College will encourage funders to adopt our Sustainable Travel Policy principles within the Terms and Conditions of awards, who do not already.

• The policy explicitly references that there may be occasions where the rail alternative to flights is not appropriate such as safety considerations (e.g., in some countries/regions public transport may not be sufficiently safe) or due to health, wellbeing or caring responsibilities. We are encouraging rail alternatives to flights when the journey time is less than 5 hours from London terminals.

• In-person research, teaching and collaboration are woven into how the College operates. The climate conscious travel approach asks you to consider whether the specific journey is essential for progressing research, learning or business needs and whether the same outcome could be achieved via alternatives to business travel.
• We are encouraging colleagues to prioritise fewer high-quality trips over quantity of travel, due to the high emission intensity of travel, particularly aviation.
• We ask to consider whether the travel taken is associated with significant opportunities or outputs that can only be achieved by in-person activity and how many people are essential on each trip.
• Examples of essential travel could include proposal-drafting or kick off meetings with project partners to build personal working relationships and trust for long-term collaboration, fieldwork/lab-work that cannot be carried out locally or virtually, establishing networks of researcher collaborations or career development opportunities or fact-finding missions with multiple meetings in one trip.

• We want to avoid administrative burden on staff, with work ongoing to operationalise the policy with clear timelines and goals.
• If you foresee any barriers to implementation whilst reading the proposed policy, please provide comments by either signing up to attend the workshops or by feedback form.

• We recognise that some in-person collaborations are woven into how the College operates. The climate conscious travel approach asks you to consider whether the specific journey is essential for progressing research, learning or business needs and whether the same outcome could be achieved via alternatives to business travel.
• We encourage prioritising fewer high-quality trips over quantity of travel.
• We ask to consider whether the travel taken is associated with significant opportunities or outputs that can only be achieved by in-person activity and how many people are essential on each trip.
• Examples of essential travel could include alumni and recruitment meetings where face time is valuable to building relationships, fundraising meetings where in-person interaction is significantly more likely to result in a successful outcome or public outreach/engagement activities that cannot be carried out locally or virtually.

• The Sustainable Travel Working Group will continue to review the guidelines which informs the College’s approach to all matters relating to business travel such as investigating a travel mitigation fund/internal carbon tax, taking care that reductions in aviation emissions are distributed fairly across the Imperial community.

• To support the policy, we plan to monitor business air travel via Egencia and expense claim data at a Faculty and Departmental level every 6 months to review our position and whether our carbon emissions have been reduced. This will be reported at the Sustainability Strategy Committee to then cascade to Faculties and Departments. We will investigate options to set up automatic data collection to support monitoring and reporting.
• We plan to develop annual indicators to keep track of progress such as total air miles travelled, total number of flights taken, total number of flights taken in business class, total number of international flights per FTE.