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.