Corporate Travel
Corporate travel brings our employees together with key partners, including vendors, factories and community partners.
Highlights
While we do not have a formal strategy around managing and reducing GHGs generated for corporate travel, we experienced significant reductions in climate impact because of a focus on reducing REI expenses during the challenging economy of 2008. The climate impact of corporate travel dropped from just under 7 percent of our total carbon footprint in 2007 to 5 percent of our 2008 footprint. This decrease occurred despite the fact that we now include the climate impacts of rental cars used by employees and mileage reimbursed to employees traveling in their personal cars for REI business.
Overall, this improvement was due more to REI's focus on expense reduction in 2008 because of the economy rather than a more targeted effort aimed at GHG reductions from corporate travel.
Challenges
Even with a focus on expense reductions, corporate travel will continue to require, at times, air travel and the use of cars. These uses will continue to contribute to our carbon footprint for the foreseeable future until climate neutral options are readily available. As the economy strengthens, we could see increases in corporate travel that would increase our climate impact.
Looking Forward
While we understand that some business travel will remain necessary, we are committed to minimizing business travel for the sake of expense reduction and to decrease our carbon footprint. Technology solutions that enable web conferences and other ways of accomplishing work without traveling may have a significant impact on both the environmental impact and the cost of business travel.
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