Business travel - what you can do

Academic and business travel is an integral part of University life, but it also has significant impacts – in particular on the levels of carbon emissions driving climate change. 

Thinking differently about travel can reduce these impacts while maintaining the essential value of the University’s connections with the outside world.  

This guidance offers advice for staff and students on making more sustainable choices when considering the need to travel for work or study. 

It is based on a simple three-step hierarchy for promoting sustainable travel:

  1. Reduce the need to travel
  2. Switch to sustainable travel
  3. Improve the efficiency of travel

The hierarchy recognises the relative carbon intensity, as well as the time and cost implications, of different travel options. 

This guidance is available in the form of a downloadable Business Travel Toolkit (PDF, 1,679kB)‌.

To help signpost staff to the most appropriate business travel option, we’ve also developed an interactive decision tree. For the best experience, download the Business travel decision tree (PDF, 2,490kB)‌ to your computer and open it in Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader. Alternatively you can open it directly in your web browser.

This guidance should be read in association with University policies relating to business travel, notably the Travel and Expenses Policy and business travel procurement guidelines.