Minimising business travel

As a result of the substantial cuts we have achieved in CO₂ emissions from power consumption and heating since 2003, business travel easily constitutes Swiss Re’s largest emissions source today. Since the business trips our employees take are ultimately driven by client needs, they are difficult to influence. However, we have taken several measures to reduce the need for business travel and to curb unnecessary business trips:

For a start, we have built up a dense network of video conferencing equipment across the Group. Recently, we partly replaced these facilities with state-of-the-art telepresence technology, which creates a real-time, life-size virtual meeting experience in specially designed rooms. By the end of 2015, we had 63 video conferencing rooms and 64 telepresence facilities worldwide.

We continuously monitor all travel budgets and collect travel data centrally. Furthermore, we introduced an internal carbon levy on air travel in 2014, which uses the “polluter pays” principle. It allocates the costs of the Voluntary Emissions Reductions (VERs) we need to buy to offset our CO₂ emissions to the Group’s Global Functions in proportion to their respective share of air travel; previously they had been borne centrally by Group Finance. This internal price on carbon heightens awareness of travel costs among our managers and employees and creates a further incentive to reduce air travel, in addition to flight costs.

Despite these measures, the amount of kilometres travelled per employee and the associated emissions have been rising in recent years. A key driver has been our continued expansion into high-growth markets. In 2015, too, the total distances our employees travelled on average increased slightly. But because they made fewer business trips in carbon intense flight classes, per-capita emissions still fell by 2.1%.