It's time to bring travel and its associated emissions out of the closet

Delve deeply into most companies' environmental and carbon targets and the chances are that, if the company is growing, costs and emissions from travel will be increasing. Most companies will happily talk about behaviour change initiatives to cut waste or office energy use, but if the conversation moves towards travel, it all goes quiet.

When you talk to people about the reluctance to address carbon emissions from travel, you get a variety of stock answers. The CEO is wedded to his beloved car and doesn't want the debate; our high achievers are literally high flyers and we can't curb their travel; company cars and travel benefits are an essential part of our rewards package; clients demand that we meet them face-to-face. And so on.

But the times they are a-changing. Fuel prices are soaring, profits are being squeezed and hard-pressed chief financial officers are starting to demand instant solutions. Cue a range of draconian top-down initiatives, one of the current favourites being no-travel days and even weeks. These are typical of an attempt to fix a major cultural and behavioural challenge with a piecemeal sticky-plaster approach.

Global Action Plan, with support from Telefónica O2, has been bringing together a range of diverse businesses and organisations to openly discuss the transport challenges they face. The ultimate aim is to increase collaboration and provide freely available guidance as to how a more strategic approach could help organisations deal with this most obstinate of issues.

The debates have been fascinating. An overwhelming consensus quickly emerged that dressing up no-travel weeks as green initiatives, when they are really about cost saving, won't fool anybody. This is greenwash, and it can damage internal trust in the organisation's whole CSR agenda. Besides, employees will often simply move meetings to after the no-travel week, or classify their travel as essential. The sticky-plaster approach fails because it ignores the fundamental cultural change that is required if businesses are serious about changing the way in which their employees travel.

A range of other common themes have emerged. Most organisations admit that they have no strategic policy in place to cut travel without damaging business efficiency. Responsibility for the issue floats between human resources, fleet management, CSR teams and ICT departments.

This lack of strategic overview manifests itself in a mishmash of procedures and policies with no consistency. For example, encouraging people to work from home doesn't chime with line managers' expectations of bums on seats in the office. The plethora of different ways to book travel means that it is hard to track actual costs and carbon emissions. Taxis are a prime example of this; the financial and carbon cost is often lost as people claim the money back on expenses.