ECB looks to cut carbon via business travel

The European Central Bank has instructed its staff to use green transport when travelling to certain cities.

In its environmental statement released on July 31, the bank said that although it was still “well on track” to meet its environmental targets, travel-related emissions had risen by 5% between 2023 and 2024.

The bank said aviation-related emissions “remained the largest contributor” to the figure, and it had therefore mandated its staff in Frankfurt to take the train on business trips to Amsterdam, Basel, Brussels, Paris and “all German destinations”.

A spokesperson for the bank tells Central Banking that the “travel rules in question apply to ECB staff”, and that the bank introduced its first default rail travel destinations in 2023.

However, Central Banking understands that the new rules will not be mandatory for ECB executive board members.

The bank said that last year its total emissions had declined by 0.2% compared with 2023. It said there had been a 38% decrease in scope 1 emissions thanks to “cooling agent losses”, but that there had also been a 13.2% increase in heating and cooling consumption across its three buildings in Frankfurt. Scope 3 emissions had fallen by 1.2%, notwithstanding the uptick in travel-related pollution.

The bank’s previous efforts to reduce travel-related emissions had not been successful, it said. Although the ECB set out to limit these emissions to 60% of the level observed in 2019, last year they had stood at 72% of the 2019 baseline. This was despite a reduction in staff travel volumes, as measured in kilometres travelled, which the ECB said was only 65% of the amount seen in 2019.

The bank said it had created a “dashboard” to help staff understand their departments’ travel behaviour “with a more thorough analysis of the real business travel needs”.

The ECB said it was also looking to collaborate with other central banks in the Eurosystem to explore how they might make “inter-institutional business travel and events more sustainable”. It said had aimed to limit in-person conferencing involving external participants to 50% of all conferences scheduled for 2023–24, but said it had exceeded this target by getting the figure down to 21.7%.

The bank is looking to limit the average number of physical and hybrid meetings organised by the ECB with external participants onsite to 2024 levels with a 10% buffer.

Its updated environmental management programme for the next two years aims to further decarbonise the bank’s operational activities to meet its 2030 emissions target. The ECB said it had “energy, emissions, materials and waste, biodiversity and procurement as well as awareness raising and stakeholder management” in its crosshairs.

Although the bank was setting a particular focus on reducing travel-related emissions, it said it was also looking to “green” its procurement procedures and limit emissions related to water use, waste processing and recycling, and energy efficiency.

Some of the bank’s efforts have proved controversial. In a survey in April by its unofficial staff union Ipso, and seen by Central Banking, one employee wrote that they felt as though they were “about to vomit” after reading about the ECB stopping the provision of hot water in order to promote “a green environment” and make “savings”.

A source at the bank verified the commenter’s claims, and noted that the temperature control policy was not in place for executive board members.

“I care about heating, and hot water to wash my hands properly,” the staff member wrote, adding that they “should not be asked to bring hot [water] bottles to warm myself up whenever I feel frozen after washing hands”.

The bank’s spokesperson tells Central Banking that “in response to the energy crisis in 2021, the ECB introduced a range of energy-saving measures, including disabling the water heating function in the sinks of the ECB’s main building bathrooms. Exceptions are made for specific conditions”.