Businesses World-Wide Urged to Replace Travel with Video Conferencing

On Thursday, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), urged businesses world-wide to reduce conventional business travel, and instead seek to replace it with video conferencing technologies, as he spoke to members of the All-party Parliamentary Sustainable Aviation Group on Thursday.

Appearing at the event via video conference link in London, Dr Pachauri said reducing business travel would cut aviation emissions. In many developed countries, air transportation represents 40% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

One important contributor to this source is the growth of civil aviation across the globe,” he told MPs. A focused effort to shift business travel for conferences and meetings of all types to video-based communication would be of great benefit in reducing and controlling the growth of emissions from aviation. I therefore endorse the concept and practice of video conferencing as an important substitute for business and conference-related travel in the fight to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

A report published in May claimed 89% of FTSE 350 companies expect to reduce flights in the next ten years and 85% see video conferencing as a way to help achieve that goal. While the rise in fuel costs is the main reason corporations are reducing physical travel and replacing it with video conferencing services, many of them are also concerned about the environment. Shifting to video conferencing in the short term reduces travel and indirect costs, while protecting the environment is a long term problem that many individuals and corporations are realizing needs to be dealt with today.