Whether or not it’s deliberate, a major travel industry association seems to be applying a touch of greenwash to its members’ steadily growing carbon footprint.
And it seems likely that continuing demand from meetings and events might be one of the underlying causes.
Sometimes it isn’t clear whether an organization has set out to mislead, or whether greenwashing reveals a poor understanding of how to meet a higher green standard. But either way, the results are the same: with more than enough greenwash to go around, consumer skepticism is one of the biggest barriers anytime anyone tries to introduce sustainable products and practices, in the meetings industry or anywhere else.
Over the weekend, the bloggers at Get Energy Smart Now posted a hilarious video that spoofs the spin that still passes for substance in too many organizations. Less hilarious was the announcement earlier this month from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), an organization that represents 230 airlines and 93% of scheduled international air traffic, claiming that the airline industry is set to achieve “carbon neutral growth” by 2020.
“Today, we have taken a major step forward by committing to a global cap on our emissions in 2020,” IATA CEO Giovanni Bisignani told industry leaders at the World Air Transport Summit in Kuala Lumpur. “After this date, aviation’s emissions will not grow even as demand increases. Airlines are the first global industry to make such a bold commitment.”
In advance of the deadline, IATA’s goals call for the airline industry to improve fuel efficiency by an average of 1.5% from 2009 to 2020. By 2050, the industry body commits to a 50% carbon reduction. Ambitious as it sounds—ambitious as it will no doubt be—even that target will mean that airlines aren’t pulling their weight, if we know that the global economy needs an 80% carbon reduction by 2030 (pessimistically) to 2050 (optimistically) to avert catastrophic climate change.
But before then, there are two messages embedded in the IATA announcement that should leap out at the discerning greenwash connoisseur.
The first is the association’s implication that its members will be carbon neutral by 2020. According to Wikipedia, carbon neutrality “refers to achieving net zero carbon emissions by balancing a measured amount of carbon released with an equivalent amount sequestered or offset.” A careful read of the IATA announcement shows that the 2020 commitment only covers new growth in air travel, not pre-existing air traffic…so the letter of the announcement is accurate.
But news reports aren’t always based on a careful read, or on a knowledgeable read. That’s how eTurbo News came up with this interpretation of the IATA announcement:
“Gloomy economic perspectives do not deter IATA [from turning] aviation into a carbon-neutral industry by the year 2020.”
It’s a dramatically different message. But it’s the story eTN readers will take away unless they go back to the original source. IATA can hardly be held responsible if its announcements are distorted by industry media. Except that if they don’t want to be misunderstood, they can start by leaving out precise terms like “carbon neutral” until they really have some idea of how to make their industry…I don’t know, carbon neutral?
The second issue is what IATA is asking its members to do between now and 2020. A 1.5% annual improvement in fuel efficiency might sound reasonable, given the available technology. But air travel is built on the hope and expectation of continued growth, and if rising oil prices lead to a more sustainable, less carbon-intensive industry, it will be by accident, not by design.
By 2015, according to U.K. futurist Rohit Talwar, 400 million people in China and India will have enough money to travel internationally for the first time. China still expects 10% growth in domestic air travel this year, while gulfnews.com reports that “the beginning of summer is already seeing signs of a pick-up in air travel,” with “new routes and even new airlines…cropping up.”
Which means there’s a context for the 1.5% annual efficiency improvement. Overall, in IATA’s best of all possible worlds, the airlines’ carbon footprint will increase in step with growing volume.
The solution isn’t as simple as shutting down air travel. According to a recent report by Oxford Economics, cited by Ben Sandilands on the Plane Talking blog: “While reduced growth in aviation would have considerable impacts on global employment, economic output, and social development, it would not necessarily imply lower emissions when the impact of replacement activities and alternative transport are taken into account.”
And, it must be said, a share of that activity is the lifeblood of meetings.
When meeting professionals measure progress toward sustainability, air travel is often the category that falls farthest short. No one in our industry has figured out how to continue organizing the face-to-face interactions that create breakthrough results for hundreds of millions of participants per year, without contributing to a carbon footprint that could be a breaking point for our grandchildren.
But none of that diminishes IATA’s duty to speak plainly about the challenges ahead. If steady improvements in efficiency are not enough to arrest carbon emissions, they should say so. If we don’t yet know how to genuinely solve the problem, they should say that, too.
Otherwise, they’re greenwashing. The heads-up for the airlines, and for industries like ours that depend on them, is that it shows.