FCM Consulting partners with CAPA to provide greater insight on sustainable flights

Sustainability continues to rise to the top of the agenda for business. Companies are increasingly eager to enhance their environmental performance and reduce their climate impact, without harming the performance of their business.

However, when it comes to the sustainability of their travel programmes, many companies don't have the information needed to fully calculate their impacts. Nor do they have the tools required to measure or visualise their sustainability performance against targets.

Given that business travel can account for as much as 80% of a company's total carbon dioxide equivalent (C02e) emissions, and air travel can account for 90% or more of business travel emissions, it is essential that companies have a full measure to their air travel emissions.

To resolve these concerns, FCM Consulting has announced a partnership with CAPA - Centre for Aviation in launching a new service which will help clients address sustainability concerns when planning business travel.

The service combines methodology from FCM's sustainability experts with the multi-level benchmarking developed by CAPA and its partner Envest Global and formalised in the CAPA-Envest Airline Sustainability Benchmarking Report. The report provides and independent and consistent ranking of the sustainability performance of the world's largest airlines.

This goes well beyond the typical single CO2e metric used in impact calculations.

Instead, the exclusive CAPA-Envest Airline Sustainability Rating system is used. This provides an independent and consistent ranking of airlines sustainability performance, based on more than 10 different parameters.

By incorporating metrics such as passenger CO2e per RPK (revenue passenger kilometer), passenger CO2e per ASK (available seat kilometer), average passenger load factors, sustainable aviation fuel utilisation and other, the Airline Sustainability Rating system allows for truer calculations of airline emissions and sustainability metrics. For travel programmes and businesses, it means better comparisons between airlines and a more informed choice when selecting travel partners.

FCM clients will benefit from the ability to leverage more sustainability performance indicators for their air travel strategy where sustainability is concerned. This can be done without impacting the quality and consistency of their carbon reporting for established initiatives such as Science Based Targets milestones.

The company anticipates this information will be hugely beneficial to those looking to overlay existing travel policy elements with new sustainability data which is applicable on a macro level to allow for broader strategic decisions in comparison to case-by-case application of existing trip level calculations and reallocation of budget towards airlines that are performing better overall in the new index.