An Overview Of Our Solution
10:10 Climate Action is creating a slow travel scheme called Climate Perks to combat the impact of flying.
Flying is the fastest growing contributor to climate change. On current trends, aviation could represent 15% of global emissions by 2050. But public concern about the climate impacts of aviation has gone down over the last few years - and there are no incentives for people to reduce their flying.
Climate Perks is a pioneering scheme in which companies offer additional leave to employees travelling overland on holiday rather than flying, thereby encouraging low carbon travel. The additional leave covers the often longer time taken for overland travel.
By getting corporates to join Climate Perks we aim to help seed a cultural shift that recognises the damage caused by aviation and identifies - and enables - benefits of alternatives.
- Population Impacted: 1,000
- Continent: Europe
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Context Analysis
Flying is the fastest growing source of carbon emissions globally. Aviation burns 5m barrels of oil every day and contributes around 2.5% to total carbon emissions, a proportion which could rise to 22% by 2050 as other sectors emit less. Unlike other sectors where there might be a greener alternative, there is currently no way to fly 8m people every day without burning lots of dirty kerosene. Aircraft are becoming more fuel-efficient, but not quickly enough to offset the huge demand in growth. Electric planes remain decades away, weighed down by batteries that can’t deliver nearly as much power per kilo as jet fuel.
The average personal carbon footprint in Britain is 6.5t, USA 16.5t and globally 5t (The World Bank 2014). To get down to a fair share of the world’s total; this must be cut to 1.2t. On every New York to London roundtrip flight, each traveller emits about 1.2t of CO2, for New York to San Francisco it’s 0.9t. If we fly, air travel overshadows all our other impacts.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
We would like the audience to take overland travel to their holiday destination as opposed to flying. Their Climate Perks employer will give the additional leave that this slower but less carbon emitting travel requires.
Employees will then share their positive travel experience with their colleagues, friends and family. How they had both a nice, smooth and scenic travel experience and extra leave to enjoy it.
Friends will like the concept and encourage their company to join the scheme and so Climate Perks will expand and further reduce carbon emissions.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
We have chosen this behavioural intervention based on research that employees would be supportive.
Polling by D-CYFOR for 10:10 Climate Action found that 54% of Millennials and 50% of Gen X would prefer employers who support environmentally conscious holiday travel. 39% of all those questioned ranked “extra paid leave to cover the additional journey time of taking a train” as their preferred employer incentive to support more sustainable travel choices if traveling to Europe.
Half of those taking 3-5 flights a year demonstrated a strong willingness to explore alternatives and stated they would prefer or strongly prefer an employer that offered incentives to holiday by train rather than plane.
With more and more companies seeking to green their practices, the findings suggest that supporting staff to make more ethical travel choices offers one effective way for businesses to marry environmental concerns with improved employee benefits.
10:10 also have learnt over the years effective behavioural change strategies and have the support of Futerra an agency who have previously produced the UK Climate Change Communications Strategy for the Climate Change Communications Working Group (UK), an evidence-based strategy aiming to change attitudes towards climate change in the UK. The strategy was extensively researched and practiced within the area of sustainable behavioural change. http://www.stuffit.org/carbon/pdf-research/behaviourchange/ccc-rulesoft…
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
In the UK 57% of people are aware of the issues of climate change and would like to do more.
This intervention provides a mechanic for people to take signifiant climate action.
The intervention has to be framed in a positive light and this is what Climate Perks can do. With greater leave and hopefully a enhanced and more enjoyable travel experience hopefully this can change the decision making criteria for people when choosing their holiday and their mode of travel. The aim is for this intervention to make it more favourable to take slower travel and so take climate action.
Describe your implementation
Climate Perks is a pilot project and we are fundraising to develop the project and gain corporate feedback on the model and marketing. We are at the beginning and so seeking founder members to join Naturesave and Futerra. We have a list of prospective corporates and organisations with an affiliation to 10:10 (almost 1,500 companies in the UK joined our original 10:10 campaign) ranging from Unilever to universities.
We will work with partners around launch, and into public delivery, to develop a press and PR strategy to drive awareness, and create different activities to disseminate the scheme including: direct approaches to businesses, working with our email list and online audience, providing actions to the general public, holding public events, online advertising etc. Being 10:10 Climate Action, we'll want to have a strong element of using people power to start change within organisations, not just using our own staff to begin conversations.
Ahead of the launch, Naturesave and Futerra will provide valuable real world case studies of a slow travel policy in action and be a key tool to recruit initial members.
To ensure take up of Climate Perks there needs to be complete confidence in the scheme. We are are gaining feedback from a wide variety of our contacts to create a legitimate, fair and accessible scheme that is both scaleable and sustainable for both employees and employers.
The success of the scheme depends on companies signing up to and promoting it and employees utilising it.
Aware that Climate Perks must be promoted and taken up within companies to be successful, minimum marketing and communication benchmarks will be written into member agreements.
External connections
We have starting partners in the UK in Naturesave (insurance) and Futerra (marketing consultants). Through existing corporate partners and contacts including Ben & Jerry’s, IKEA, Patagonia, Imperial College London and more we aim to create a robust, accessible and effective scheme.
Climate Perks as a scheme will be workable across a variety of sectors from advertising to government departments. There should be no reason a wide variety of employers cannot join the scheme. Climate Perks will also support companies with their existing sustainability targets and support targets against sustainable development goals 12 (Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns) and (13 (Climate Action).
The scheme should garner support from overland travel companies and transport and could connect with those affiliated to the slow travel movement and benefitting local communities.
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
NatureSave and Futerra both have slow travel schemes running and so provide small scale case studies.
Futerra reports 10%-15% of employees utilise the scheme annually.
Naturesave estimates 50% of staff have participated in the scheme and 25% participate annually. They estimate 50% of ‘possible’ (i.e. short-medium haul) annual leave air travel has been reduced by staff opting for other methods of travel.
Futerra stated that employees on their return from holiday always talk positively with colleagues about their slow travel experience.
Naturesave said there can be “flurries of activity” when there is greater internal communication and it is discussed more.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
Climate Perks is focused on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and would create signifiant reductions.
Just swapping a single round trip London to Barcelona for train could eliminate ~80kg CO2 emissions, ~70% of Co2 emissions*
The statistics for the reduction of carbon emissions are highly variable according to mode of transport, capacity of transport, efficiency and number of passengers.
Grams of CO2 per passenger kilometre**: Train 14, bus/coach 68, car 104, plane 285
There are many tools to work out more precise carbon emissions from varying modes of travel which would be integral to the scheme to allow employers and employees to both show the impact of their actions and Climate Perks.
* Engineering ToolBox (2017) CO2 calculator
**European Environment Agency, estimates based on TRACCS database 2013.
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
Naturesave and Futerra both reported that their slow travel policies brought climate action more to the forefront of employee's minds. With both these companies, being sustainable and environmentally minded it is hard to know how much influence the policy is having elsewhere but both reported take up of cycle to work schemes.
Naturesave report staff conducting a beach clean in addition to the slow travel scheme.
These case studies support a key expectation of Climate Perks, that climate change is brought more to the forefront of employees minds and so creates greater discussion and actions. Consequently other sustainability practices could be increased e.g. cycle to work schemes, recycling etc.
Sustainability
As we are a small charity, sustainability of the scheme is paramount. Having looked at established accreditation schemes and marks e.g. The Living Wage, Investors in People etc. we would look at a membership model with fees graded to employer size (no. of employees).
Initially though as the scheme is developed and a base built, grant funding is essential.
Once we have reached 50 core founder members the scheme expects to be sustainable.
Return on investment
Initially we have sought trust funding (£5,000 - £10,000) to cover the initial model and marketing development.
A key stage in the development is then to hire dedicated staff (£20,000 - £30,000) to progress the membership, this is where Solution Search’s support would be allocated and critical for project development.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
10:10 is developing this project deliberately because it is an accessible model which is not time or labour intensive and so can be used across the world and have a significant impact on carbon emissions and climate change.
We will initially be focusing our marketing in the UK as this is the area where we have greater access corporate and organisation networks and can initially have the greatest impact. With appropriate staff, materials, communications and HR support the scheme could easily travel and as with many business accreditations companies could join the scheme across the world.