Brighter Planet To Power MasterCard Carbon Emissions Reporting

Partnering with carbon calculation and offset provider Brighter Planet, MasterCard Worldwide plans to provide carbon emissions reporting on travel purchased by corporate card customers. MasterCard said it would distribute the carbon emissions reporting to corporate card administrators through its smartdata.gen2 reporting system as well as in an outbound data file used by companies that rely on other data reporting platforms.

Carbon reporting is scheduled to debut later this year for corporate customers in the United States. A MasterCard official said issuing banks "will determine how and when this optional service will be offered" to their customers. The collaboration is designed to help corporations "evaluate the impact their travel activities and corporate buying decisions have on their broader sustainability initiatives," said MasterCard Worldwide group head of U.S. commercial products Jay Singer.   

"Travel is a huge driver of costs and carbon emissions—as much as 30 percent or 40 percent of total operations for some companies," according to prepared remarks from Brighter Planet CEO Patti Prairie.

"Getting good carbon info by traditional means, whether compiled in-house, by an outside consultant, or with specialized software, costs time and money—and that means it's done less frequently and less carefully than it could be, which compromises environmental and economic potential," Prairie wrote on her blog. "It's this problem that MasterCard and Brighter Planet are targeting with our new carbon intelligence partnership. Last year, 39 percent of Global 500 companies analyzed and reported their employee travel footprint, up from 34 percent the year before.

"Our work with MasterCard is about giving companies deeper insights on travel purchasing so they can make smarter decisions," Prairie added.

Brighter Planet's "CM1" calculation platform factors up to "18 different characteristics" of a flight to calculate carbon emissions, said director of business development and strategic partnerships Robbie Adler. In addition to such charge card data details as carrier, city pair, flight number and connecting flights, the model considers aircraft type, fuel efficiency, average load factor of a given flight, cargo-passenger ratios and class of service. The model "assigns a greater percentage of emissions to those in first class than economy," Adler said.

CM1 pulls data from "predominately public data sets that we parse, organize and correct," he said. Using an open source platform, the company hosts all data on its site to allow users to "see the assumptions we make, data sets we reference and reporting standards that the scores are in compliance with," Adler added. 

Risk management company Det Norske Veritas in April certified that Brighter Planet CM1's carbon models for flights, automobiles, buildings and fuels, among others, meet the carbon methodology standards of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, ISO 14064 and the General Reporting Protocol.

Compliance to such standards is important, Adler said, because carbon emissions reporting is "most useful or provides additional value" when it can be integrated into a consistent reporting framework.

State Of Corporate Travel Metrics

"We've definitely looked a fair amount at the travel space and at the state of carbon tools in the industry," Adler said. "These were tools that were developed early on—in 2007 and 2008—when there was a big push for reporting. There really hasn't been much evolution. In far too many cases you're seeing what we would describe as 'low-resolution calculations' that are predominately distance calculations with carbon intensity per mile flown.

"By looking at things such as aircraft type, load factor and layovers, you begin to get greater contrast between two flights on the same route," Adler continued. "It can be used not just as a reporting tool, but as a decision-support tool. Companies could begin to encourage employees—if all things are equal in terms of price and timing—to take the lower carbon impact alternative."

Brighter Planet developed its CM1 platform—released in September—as a more robust, "more accessible web service" than the earlier calculators it built for a partnership with Bank of America. Brighter Planet also "opened up our API to allow individual developers or companies to interface in a more integrated manner."

In April, developer Scott Bulua paired APIs from CM1 and TripIt to build TripCarbon, a free tool that calculates carbon emissions from TripIt itineraries. TripIt users can log in at www.tripcarbon.com to pull in all prior itineraries and view carbon emissions for each trip, with details for air, car, hotel or other elements listed.