2020 Belgian Sustainability Report
Travel
The best route forward
At Deloitte, we recognise the impact of our actions and are using this opportunity to proactively shape how we travel for business in the future.
Companies are major contributors of global warming and corporate travel is responsible for a huge percentage of global greenhouse emissions. Before COVID-19, our firm was already rethinking our assumptions around corporate travel. During the pandemic, we were able to accelerate our steps towards a greener take on air and long-distance rail journeys.
Reduce our CO2 emissions within travel
Cut back on air travel
How often we fly matters. Burning jet fuel releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. These gases block heat from escaping, causing temperatures to rise.
While air travel is essential to servicing clients, it is also one of the largest sources of carbon emissions. That is why Deloitte Belgium has been very thoughtful about how to offset unavoidable air travel emissions and find new ways to do business while caring for the environment.
Travel less
By establishing Deloitte North and South Europe gradually over the past four years, we have reinforced our commitment in this region. This way, we can provide better services to our customers, offer our people more opportunities, have a deeper impact on society and exchange knowledge in a smarter way to service the client.
COVID-19, indeed, has had an impact on travel, but by integrating our offerings and services across countries in our network, we can also look at smarter ways to meet the needs of our clients. And we are well on our way to reaching our target of lowering our air mileage km per headcount by 25% by FY21. Looking further into the future, we aim to reduce the number of kilometres flown per traveler by 55% in 2023 and 60% by 2030.
Lower our air mileage
KPI - Looking further into the future, we aim to reduce the number of kilometres flown per traveller by 55% in FY23 and 60% by FY30.
Rethink short haul trips
Becoming more aware of our carbon footprint is a good thing. It gives us a chance to set more worthwhile targets.
To meet the target of a 25% reduction in air travel by 2021, a new travel policy was established that encourages video and phone conferencing whenever possible.
During the pandemic, we have learned that air travel is not necessary to do business. It also motivated us to create more environmentally-conscious travel guidelines to support our mobility ambitions such as travelling by train not plane to neighbouring countries. Our targets for this decade are to have 80% of all business trips to cities in neighbouring countries, within a 500km radius, made by train by 2023 and 100% by 2030.
Conduct business trips to cities in neighbouring countries within a 500 km radius by train
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