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A survey of Canadian corporate travel managers released last week found that the business community may not be quite as behind the green revolution as some of their PR campaigns would imply. For those who worry about air travel's significant contribution to pollution and climate change, this is not great news.

The survey, conducted by the Conference Board of Canada and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, found the number of companies in Canada who reported voluntary carbon offset programs was slashed almost in half from 2008 to 2009. The number who said they were “looking into it,” an indicator of the role of carbon offsets in the image a company is interested in conveying to the public, fell from almost half to just a third.

Carbon offsetting is the practice of calculating the amount of carbon emitted by an activity (say, flying from Vancouver to Toronto or heating an office building) and paying a service to do something (say, plant trees or recycle tires) that will reduce or absorb that same amount. Though they're most familiar through consumer-purchased one-offs through companies like Zerofootprint, which you can click through to from Air Canada's booking site, carbon offsets are also bought in bulk by companies.

When a company does decide to set a carbon goal, the effects on travel can be dramatic. In 2008, Burnaby, B.C.-based Hemlock Printers signed with Offsetters, the company that's providing the Olympics and its various sponsors with their first-ever comprehensive carbon offset program. By the end of the year, as the added expense motivated them to avoid unnecessary trips, they had reduced executive travel by 8 per cent and client travel by 47 per cent.

“There's definitely a few members of our executive team in the U.S. that would prefer to be up at the plant more often,” says Hemlock VP Richard Kouwenhoven. “For sales relationships, it is a nice part of building relationships to have time to visit – but it's kind of a luxury that people don't necessarily have the time or the budgets for.”

Though there has been much talk about the effect the recession has had and will have on business travel, it's really carbon policy that will dictate its future. And the survey results, covering the period the economy went from boom to bust, indicate that many companies consider carbon offsets a frill that can be cut when money gets tight. Zerofootprint's own figures back that up. Its sales grew 32 per cent from 2007 to 2008, and then only 18 per cent the next year.

And as offset experts discuss the CBOC/ACTE findings, three things become clear.

First, if you work for a company with a carbon reduction policy, your travel's almost certain to decline. “If you're buying offsets, that's cash that comes out of your budget,” says Zerofootprint's founder and CEO Ron Dembo. If your company sets a carbon reduction quota, with anything over the limit being subject to a carbon offset fee, chances are they'll cut the travel rather than pay the fee.

As Dembo explains, that's what offsets were designed to do.“I like offsets as a means to an end,” he says. “The end is really cutting down carbon. It's like putting an internal tax on carbon within an organization, a tax that goes away if you drop your travel.”

Second, governmental regulations that would force companies to instate carbon reduction plans are a near certainty in the near future. According to Donovan Woollard, COO of Offsetters, British Columbia has already set a 33 per cent carbon reduction mandate by 2020. It was the offset industry's goal before the recession, he says, to have federal policies in place by 2012, with what are known as mobile emissions (i.e. cars, boats, trains and planes) regulated by 2015.

And third, the recession may very well have pushed the movement toward offsets back by at least a year, maybe more.

“There are many associated costs,” says Ann-Marie Reininger, head of ACTE Canada, speaking of the sort of comprehensive corporate implementations of carbon offset programs that might reduce travel budgets. In order to set a reduction quota, a company has to know how much carbon it's emitting in the first place, which isn't always easy, given the fact that heating, lighting, computing, manufacturing and travel are all parts of the equation, and all parts of different departments.

Though she and the carbon offset executives are confident that the environment is a growing corporate priority in general, both for PR and bottom-line reasons, with downturns, downsizing and corporate reconstruction, she figures carbon offset policies have mostly fallen down the list of priorities. “Whether corporations will get there, I'm not quite sure,” Reininger says.

This year could provide a case study. The report predicts an economic rebound for 2010. If indeed companies get more flush, we could see greening policies grow – and travel budgets cut again – before long.

Special to The Globe and Mail

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