Green Business Awards 2009: Carbon management - Business travel

Logica offers IT consulting and business services. It has more than 40,000 employees worldwide, 5,000 of them in Britain. Its UK business had a turnover of £710m in 2008.

The company spends about £10m annually on travel in Britain and has introduced a series of measures designed to reduce its business travel-related carbon emissions. A target was set to reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions from travel by 3.3% per annum from 2006 to 2010. Logica has now increased the target to 6% per annum from 2008 with the aim of halving emissions by 2020.

The company has implemented processes to encourage staff to use non-travel methods for meetings, and made approval procedures for travelling more stringent. It has increased its spending on video, audio, live meeting, web-streaming and office communicator technologies to £1m a year. Usage of these non-travel communication technologies has increased rapidly over the past three years. Total users rose by 225% from 2006 to 2008 to reach 439,377. Estimated tonnes of CO2-equivalent avoided through non-travel communications rose from 1,846 in 2006 to 5,992 in 2008.