Cisco’s 2006 Clinton Global Initiative Carbon-to-Collaboration commitment is to reduce emissions from business air travel by 10 percent, using FY06 as a baseline. Even though Cisco’s headcount and revenue have increased at least 40 percent since FY06, year-to-year GHG emissions from air travel have decreased. We are working to continue this downward trend in the face of business growth that would normally cause an increase in travel.
The table below shows changes in headcount, revenue, and GHG emissions due to air travel over the last four years. Because we have improved our data collection and analysis methodology, the data in this table generally does not match previously reported results.
*Percent change in GHG emissions based on previously reported FY04 and FY05 air travel emissions.
Cisco TelePresence Installations
We continue to roll out Cisco TelePresence and other collaborative technologies across the company. The units in executive offices and Customer Executive Briefing Centers help reduce travel by Cisco executives, briefing presenters, and customers.
As of April 2008, 500 Cisco TelePresence units have been ordered or installed at customer sites worldwide, further increasing the size of the network and reducing overall air travel. Worldwide utilization of Cisco TelePresence units remains near 50 percent based on a 10-hour day, and many individual units are booked at or over 100 percent during the 10 hours. Use is especially heavy during the time when business days in the world’s regions overlap.
Cisco Executives Make the Trip via TelePresence
In the past, Cisco executives from around the world have flown to the company’s headquarters in San Jose, California, to attend the corporate operations review meeting, led by Chairman and CEO John Chambers. For the meeting held in June 2008, eight of the 98 attending executives skipped the journey and participated in the meeting through Cisco TelePresence links.
The executives who did not travel were at sites in India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Two Cisco TelePresence systems were used by participants in the San Jose conference room, with all of the meeting connections carried over the Cisco network as a multipoint TelePresence session. Each of the remote systems was active for an average of 16 hours over the span of the four-day meeting.
For just this one event, Cisco estimates that remote conferencing offset more than 19.9 mTCO2e. But more important, the executive meeting proved that virtual collaboration can be a successful alternative to travel even for top-level management teams.
Major Challenges
About two-thirds of Cisco employees who regularly travel by air are in the sales and field service organizations. Business activity in these organizations requires frequent interactions and is closely tied to revenue growth. By rethinking the way we conduct business, we seek to reduce travel without adversely affecting operations and customer satisfaction. The Cisco Communication Center of Excellence provides employees with instruction on how to use collaborative technologies by sharing experiences and best practices across job functions.
The growth in our emerging markets business is another major impetus to travel because relatively few employees in these countries must cover large geographic areas. Furthermore, network infrastructure is less developed in the emerging market regions, making it more difficult to replace travel with collaborative technology.
Replacing business air travel with remote collaboration (virtual meetings) is not simply a matter of installing the equipment. Business processes, management practices, and corporate culture must all change if employees are to adapt well and take full advantage of the technologies. We expect the need for travel to continually decrease over time as virtual collaboration becomes more available and prevalent in the company and among our customers and partners.
Looking to the Future
The key to success in substituting remote collaboration technologies for air travel is updating business processes and management practices to support this solution both within and outside the company.
Introduced in October 2006, Cisco TelePresence has become the company's fastest growing emerging technology, with more than 100 customers globally and 500 units having been ordered as of April 2008. Including the units that have been deployed internally and supplied to philanthropic organizations, more than 750 units are now operating worldwide. We plan to continue promoting this technology and introducing models that can reach a greater user population. We expect to expand the types of interactions supported by Cisco TelePresence with pilot programs that also help guide our product development efforts.
We plan to continue to add capabilities to Cisco WebEx, MeetingPlace, and Unified Communications solutions and make them an ever larger part of our daily business activities. As more organizations transform their operations to fully leverage these collaborative technologies, we anticipate that employee productivity and work-life balance will be enhanced as air travel emissions decrease.
We have found that a workforce that can take full advantage of remote collaboration is more effective overall than one that requires travel for face-to-face meetings:
- People make decisions more quickly.
- Cross-cultural communications improve.
- Feedback from stakeholders and customers is disseminated better within the company.
- Scarce global resources can be shared more effectively among projects.
- Products move to market faster.
To assist with our GHG reduction efforts, we have teamed with a number of strong partners:
- American Express provides consultation and reporting services for Cisco air travel data.
- Our involvement with the U.S. EPA Climate Leaders program helps us develop GHG reduction strategies. The program provides an onsite auditing resource that has reviewed our data collection processes and methodology for calculating emissions from air travel and operations. We also have an ongoing reporting relationship with EPA staff.
- Cisco is a board member of the Global eSustainability Initiative, which in partnership with The Climate Group recently released a report entitled SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age.”
Cisco’s EPA Climate Leaders and CGI greenhouse gas reduction goals are included in Appendix 4 of the report.
GHG Reporting Systems for Air Travel
To support standardization and benchmarking across companies, Cisco uses the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to help calculate business air travel, a Scope 3 emission. Emissions calculated with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol take only the length of the flight into account. But there are other factors that affect emissions and their allocation to an individual traveler, including the type of aircraft, the flight load factor, and class of service.
To improve our tactical decision making regarding air travel, Cisco has adopted the nonproprietary TRX Airline Carbon Emissions Calculator In addition, we obtain air travel data from a custom report run using the American Express AXIS@work application. By aligning this report with our travel financial accounts, we can track the percentage of air travel captured by the Cisco Travel Network. Our goal is to track 100 percent of the travel.
To verify the value of virtual collaboration, we have created models comparing our GHG emissions from air travel to emissions from the generation of electricity used to power the network that supports the collaborative technologies.
