Our recent Sustainability Network Group (SNG) x Knowledge Exchange (KE) webinar at the end of September demonstrated not only our carbon reporting progress over the last year, but how the future will involve our supply chain, customers and partners.
Starting the session with an outline on our purpose, journey, challenges and successes was Clarity’s Corporate Responsibility Manager, Anisha Tansley. As many businesses will understand, acquiring a new business can throw sustainability goals out of flux. As a result, rebaselining and extending our scope to cover all of Scope 3 became our priority. It was only through doing this that we could then positively set ourselves up for the future and help determine our next targets. However, this came with some more realistic goals for us to work towards.
An Internal Update
With data being a crucial component of decarbonisation, being able to make these tangible changes meant working with carbon reporting tools that align with our own organisation and goals. As a result, this partnership has provided more transparency. It’s also helped improve our data by looking towards activity data, such as measuring IT inventory rather than spend. This is a process we’re actively working to continue, rather than working with average industry spend figures. To learn more about our emissions breakdown and our targets, check out our newly released Responsible Business Report.
A Collaborative Approach
We quickly learnt this isn’t a feat we can do alone:
“To help us achieve what we set out to do, the key focus area for the future is on engaging with our value chain on our shared emissions.” – Anisha Tansley, Clarity.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Many organisations of all different sectors are undergoing the same challenges, so it’s important to create a shared understanding - one of the reasons the SNG was created in the first place. Working together to determine where our supply chain is at in their carbon journey, what they’ve found success in and what hurdles they’ve found along the way, ensures no-one goes through it alone. As Clarity sits at the heart of the travel ecosystem, connecting customers with travel providers, there is a concerted effort on all sides to ensure we’re doing our best to support one another thorough our own independent carbon reduction journeys.
Tan Strehler-Weston, one of the session’s guest speakers from Thrust Carbon, is a prime example of a supplier supporting customers through Clarity’s booking tool, ClarityGo. Being ‘a big consolidator of information’, Thrust became the first company to become certified to ISO 14083, the first-ever standard for calculating emissions for travel and transport, and has helped fill in the gap between the broader guidelines of the GHG protocol and the more diverse and specific methodologies.
“Lots of us will care about sustainability, but it’s not always enough to actually change behaviour. We’re really lucky...that often being more sustainable overlaps with saving cost.” – Tan Strehler-Weston, Thrust Carbon.
Being the primary source of emissions data and sustainability intelligence for companies, Thrust Carbon process a rising 30 million emissions calculations per day. This enables customers on the more advanced methodologies to better understand how certain trips, including flights can compare to one another in greater detail.
IATA’s government affairs manager, Peter O’Broin, provided session attendees a sustainability overview into the work IATA are doing globally and at UK-level. Being the global trade body for airlines and encompassing over 80% of global air traffic, hearing directly from Peter and what IATA are working towards was hugely informative. The key component to it all was Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). Emphasising that SAF still remains the most important decarbonisation lever, current industry opinion is mirrored by what former Director General of IATA noted prior to his departure: airlines cannot solve the climate crisis in a vacuum, it’s going to take cross-industry collaboration to meet the airline industry’s climate goals. However, Peter stressed:
“Sustainable fuels remains the […] single most important factor. Other factors like new technologies, airspace modernisation, [and] operational changes…can help us get some of those marginal gains. We reckon 65% of that pie is going to come from sustainable fuels.” – Peter O’Broin, IATA.
The question then becomes not only how we do we accelerate decarbonisation but how do we keep it economically sustainable, not only for our airlines but for customers too. By driving the aviation industry’s transition towards net zero by 2050, IATA advocates heavily on increasing SAF production, diversifying feedstocks to ensure scalability and helping shape policies through governments.
Finishing off our session, we heard from Helen Riddell, Head of Business Services at National Trust, who restructured their business travel policy, created dedicated resources and supported their travellers in making more ‘eco-conscious’ choices whilst travelling. Being Europe’s largest conservation charity, National Trust are multi-faceted in its organisational structure: they own land, support filming projects and hold a successful commercial operation including holiday cottages, farms, land and a let estate business. With a commitment to Net Zero by 2030, their plan was formed back in 2019, structured around four key elements: Reduce, Adapt, Capture and Engage (RACE). By first understanding their data, Helen and her team put a travel hierarchy in place, a tactic many organisations look towards to provide a simple, digestible way for travellers to understand what form of transport (if any) they should be prioritising.
“If you haven’t (got a travel hierarchy) and you’re on this journey, then that is a key ingredient I would definitely recommend.” – Helen Riddell, National Trust.
To garner support from the traveller base, Helen stresses the importance of information and resources. For example, meeting resources focused around holding a successful hybrid meeting, bringing accessibility and climate action together, and building a conference framework structured around sustainability. It’s through this engagement and collaboration that they were able to ‘say thankyou’ to staff members when reporting in 2025 demonstrated the significant carbon savings they’d managed to achieve through travellers changing their behaviour.
Conclusions
Many organisations are well on their journey to achieving their sustainability goals, however for any of us it won’t come without collaboration, transparency and change. Hearing from our speakers at Thrust Carbon, IATA and National Trust gives an insight into different parts of the story and what they’re each doing in their respective sectors to create tangible change.
If you’re a customer of Clarity and would like to be part of Sustainability Network Group, get in touch with your Account Manager for more information.
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