FAQs

• We want to make our travel more sustainable, as business travel produced roughly ca.~25,000 tCO2₂e for 2022-23. Business travel is around 10% of the university’s total carbon footprint, which is around the same as our electricity.
• In 2022-23, flights accounted for 65% of our business travel (17,000 tCO2₂e) and long-haul flights have by far the biggest impact.
• In our Sustainability Strategy 2021-2026, we committed to develop a Sustainable Travel Policy by 2022 – rollout of this is overdue.
• 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 2023.
• Travel is just one of our current priority areas for sustainability. Learn more about what the university is focusing on here.

• In March 2023, a Sustainable Travel Working Group was established, reporting to the Sustainability Strategy Committee, to develop policies and proposals to reduce Imperial’s carbon footprint from travel, as part of delivering the Sustainability Strategy. The working group is made up academics, campus operational staff, trade union and professional services staff representatives across the university.
• In May and June 2023, after consulting with some key stakeholders (such as the Students Union, central communications, Research Office, and HR representatives), workshops took place where senior academics, Early Career Researchers and administrative staff could provide feedback, voice concerns, and offer inputs to help shape the proposed policy into something ambitious but realistic. An all staff and student survey on sustainability and specifically on travel was conducted to baseline perceptions and provide insights.
• From July 2023 onwards, the proposed policy then underwent an engagement phase with the wider Imperial community for their thoughts. This consultation period started with a sustainability focused In Conversation With where the policy was talked about with Hugh Brady. Feedback was taken in this scoping stage, open to amending the ‘how’ aspect of the policy in order to ensure it works well in practice, with the intention to finalise the travel policy in the Autumn Term.
• In October 2023, following consultations, several revisions were made to the policy making the policy easier to implement whilst retaining the elements that will reduce emissions.
• The revised policy was approved in November 2023 at UMB.

• Consultees asked for more explicit acknowledgement that international travel is an essential part of academic research, especially for globally leading research. The revised policy acknowledges that collaboration and travel are a core part of our work – while asking colleagues to take a climate-conscious approach to this so that we reduce our impacts.
• Colleagues raised concerns about the wellbeing impact of long-haul economy flights, although existing Imperial policy is that economy flights are the default. The revised policy allows the use of premium economy where justified, with a higher justification and sign-off required for the exceptional use of business class. This recognises that premium economy offers greater comfort than economy without the very high additional carbon footprint of business class.

• Work is taking place to encourage and support more active travel for staff and students when commuting to campus, and we 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, and we are currently working on an Active Travel Action Plan.
• Imperial’s carbon footprint from commuting is small, because we have public transport options available as well as a high level of cycling.
• You can find more via our Active Travel webpages on the opportunities to find a way that is best for yourself, your health and the environment when it comes to Active Travel.

• 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.

• Cost is an understandable concern. Some areas of the policy such as reduction in volume and class of air travel, are likely to reduce costs. Others, such as switching to rail from air for short haul, will increase costs.
• Colleagues will need to consider and plan for the budget implications of this, as well as building it into the future research proposals.
• The central sustainability team are piloting a fund for postgraduate students to support them to switch, since their budgets may be particularly limited. You can read more about this here.
• The Sustainable Travel Working Group will be monitoring business travel every 6 months to see how the policy is working in practice. The travel footprint will be reported regularly to the Sustainability Strategy Committee, a sub-committee of the University Management Board.

• We recognise the challenges of offsetting as there are not yet established market standards for quality schemes.
• Our priority is to reduce our emissions first, as there is not enough land globally available to offset all emissions.
• 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 university.
• We will continue to use Profs Who Fly where offsetting is required by funders.

• We understand that with some funding the main consideration is cost and don’t account for low carbon travel routes. However, many funders do now require environmental impacts to be considered alongside cost.
• Where external partners (e.g., funding bodies like UKRI and Wellcome Trust) allow, the university 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 university 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 whenever the journey time is less than 5 hours from London terminals.

• In-person research, teaching and collaboration are woven into how the university 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.
• Sustainability features as one of the main priorities in our new Imperial strategy, Science for Humanity, and we have committed to leading by example in our activities and on our campuses. 
• With that in mind, we encourage you to prioritise fewer high-quality trips over quantity of travel, due to the high emission intensity of travel, particularly aviation.
• 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 or 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.

• In the consultation over the summer consultees asked that staff should be trusted to make responsible decisions locally, with their line manager and Head of Department where applicable as per policy guidance.
• The revised policy asks staff to take ownership of reducing our impacts, as without some genuine changes to our current practices we will not meet Imperial’s target for a 25% reduction per person in our travel footprint by 2026 against the baseline year 2017-18 (tonnes of CO₂e per person per year).
• To balance the need to reduce impacts with the need to allow reasonable exceptions, the policy sets the default to lower-carbon options such as virtual meetings, rail for short-haul journeys and economy/premium economy flights for long-haul journeys.
• It allows for scope for exceptions where there is a clear justification.
• The Sustainable Travel Working Group will monitor implementation and whether this proves sufficient to achieve the target, reviewing the policy as needed in future years.

• All travellers and bookers have a responsibility to be aware of all university policies around business travel – including the Sustainable Business Travel Policy principles, international travel risk assessments, visas, travel insurance and expenses.
• We want to avoid administrative burden on staff, with work ongoing to operationalise the policy with clear timelines and goals. If you experience any barriers implementing the policy, please get in touch with the team by emailing sustainable@imperial.ac.uk.
• Where you can, encourage travellers to give as much advanced warning of trips as possible, to allow for time and opportunity to apply the sustainable travel policy principles.
• Travellers are required to make responsible decisions locally, with their line manager and Head of Department where applicable as per policy guidance.
• For reasonable exceptions, the policy is clear that sign-off by the Head of Department or their delegate is required, not Occupational Health, while noting that established occupational health needs would support an exception on health and wellbeing grounds automatically.

• The travel policy recognises that some in-person collaborations are woven into how the university 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.
• 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 university’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.
• We are exploring pricing options and operational concerns with our systems, but first we are making the carbon impact of travel as transparent to colleagues at the university as much as possible.

• The university’s current nominated travel booking supplier contract is up for review and within the tender process we are making sure that when we re-procure, we have a travel system in place that supports climate-conscious travel more effectively in terms of bookings process (e.g., easier to book international rail tickets, visible carbon footprint of options).
• To support the policy, the Sustainable Travel Working Group 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. The Working Group will investigate options to set up automatic data collection to support monitoring and reporting.
• The Working Group 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.

You can find the most up-to-date Expenses Policy on the website.

The round of changes and updates to the Expenses Policy include the following: