How We Achieved a 19.3% Reduction In Carbon Intensity As a Travel Business

We’re a travel business. And we all know that CO2 is one of the biggest elephants in the room when it comes to sustainability in the industry. But we don’t want that to be the end of the story, the necessary evil that we all have to resign ourselves to and accept if we want a world where travel is still possible. We wanted to prove that a travel-focused business can reduce its carbon footprint and still grow.

When we became B Corp certified in 2023, we took a pledge to reduce our carbon contributions, undergoing stringent carbon literacy training to learn what we (as a company and individuals) were contributing. We developed ways to reduce, reuse, recycle – and rethink how we do things. And we set ourselves targets we knew we could push for.

It’s not enough to offset; we wanted to make a real-world impact. And we couldn’t be prouder of what the team has achieved. 

So, how did we do it? Alex Liste, our Director of Nature, who leads the Lemongrass Green Team and oversees our carbon budget, shares the details below.

This year’s 19.3% carbon reduction was a team-wide effort. We sought carbon reductions everywhere – from changes in the scopes of work for new business, to collaboration press trips between our clients, to a focus on flight-free travel wherever possible. Our carbon literacy training really informed a lot of this. It’s helped us all (as individuals and as a team) to be more mindful and knowledgeable on reducing our carbon footprints day-to-day, as well as in the business choices we make.

Here’s what we did.

Smarter travel planning

Last year, I helped to develop Lemongrass’s new travel policy – centered around carbon reduction and efficiency. Our focus areas in the policy:

• No domestic UK flights
• Ensuring the right team members are travelling to avoid overlapping attendance
• Can it be virtual?

Another one of our aims was to streamline travel as much as possible, combining press trips with client activity. We worked closely with media and clients, to plan detailed itineraries that visit multiple locations in one journey. This means travel is slower – but it reduces the impact significantly, and makes for better stories.

We also focused heavily on low-carbon transport choices, with rail and ferry travel prioritised wherever possible. On the road, electric vehicles were used where available.

A culture of conscious decision-making

At a cultural level, we encourage everyone at Lemongrass to question whether physically travelling is the right call – and if it is, to try to combine it with another trip, while always seeking the lowest carbon cost.

We’ve made sustainability part of our everyday practice, and have conversations about sustainability on all client calls. Off the back of this, we trialed carbon budgets with a UK client, to monitor press trip emissions, and moved them over to rail travel where possible. Throughout 2025, we ran a weekly “Eco Challenge” across the company (with prizes!) to find the latest global best practices. We’ve retained our Carbon Literacy Silver accreditation, and all new starters complete Carbon Literacy training as part of their first 6 months at Lemongrass. 

This level of awareness is embedded into our company DNA. It keeps reductions visible, practical, and deliverable in day-to-day work. And all of this has added up to our target reduction of 11% being massively exceeded.

We are absolutely committed to our long-term ambition of driving down our carbon footprint in a way that is ambitious, credible, and deliverable for a growing, service-based business.

The only way to know how we’re doing and where to improve is by measuring our carbon intensity. To do this, we’ve partnered with ecollective – a carbon footprint consultancy that helps businesses measure and reduce carbon emissions, without relying on offsets.

As Director of Nature, I’m responsible for carbon monitoring throughout the year – not just at year-end. After close to 10 years at Lemongrass, I’ve built deep client knowledge and helped to develop our existing sustainability framework, which lets me embed sustainability into the work we do for clients in a meaningful way, and into our day-to-day running of the business.

Having goals is one thing – but to get to the finish line, you’ve got to know your current position. Partnering with ecollective allows us to spot when we are off target, and helps us strategise; looking for ways we can change that will bring us back to our reduction target.

Measurement also lets us set carbon budgets. Carbon budgets are set annually for all employees and all client activity (designed in a way that still allows teams to hit all of our client KPIs).

The goal here is to encourage responsible decision-making – not to restrict what we can do. Carbon is considered alongside cost, time, and outcomes, but it usually helps us perform better on most (if not all) fronts.

Reporting: Why we use year-on-year reduction (and not a baseline year)

A common approach in carbon measurement is to pick a historic baseline year that you measure yourself against. We don’t do that, even though it’s the easier way to report. The reason we don’t use baseline year is because it can make your results look inflated, allows complacency to set in, and eventually leads to stagnation and a loss of innovative thought.

Year-on-year is harder, but it shows real, ongoing progress – or as the case may one day be, real-world CO2 increases and setbacks. It makes us more transparent, more accountable, and stops us taking the easy wins every year. But choosing this path of reporting has left us with a bit of a dilemma now; each year, reductions will become harder. Our 19% reduction last year will make future years harder to beat – especially for a business like Lemongrass, which is already operating at near-peak efficiency.

To make matters worse, the industry as a whole is not adapting as quickly as we are. Rail fares are still more expensive than flights in many cases, and the incentive to fly is heavily lobbied for by the aviation industry. It’s an uphill battle, but we’re committed to continuous improvement and long-term progress.

But we want to be clear: if our CO2 intensity increases next year, you’ll know. We won’t hide it, adjust the figures, or rewrite our targets after the fact. We want accountability, not optics.

We know this level of openness can feel uncomfortable, but we hope it gives others permission to be equally honest, because this is bigger than any one company – real progress will take an industry-wide effort, not just isolated wins (and at times losses).

Our target is smaller this year (6% compared to 11%). That might look like a step back, but it still represents a meaningful and ambitious improvement from where we are today. Importantly, it is still a reduction, which is not always the case in a growing company.

We already rely heavily on rail and other lower-carbon transport, and we’ve made many of the early gains available to us. Further reductions will now require deeper structural change.

The key thing to take away here is that a smaller percentage does not mean less commitment to our goals; it’s just the reality of sustained progress.

It’s why iPhones barely change year after year, or why the 100m sprint record is still held by Usain Bolt. Progress can be rapid at first, but as things mature and reach their optimal form, things will inevitably slow down.

That doesn’t mean we stop trying. It means we work even harder to bring about meaningful change.

As a travel industry business, some emissions are unavoidable. So, like many other companies, we invest in a range of projects that support carbon removal and broader environmental impact. Our impact fund is powered by Pinwheel, our partner for carbon removal projects.  

• You can vote for the projects you want us to fund in 2026 here!

We work with Pinwheel as part of The Conscious Travel Foundation’s Climate Impact Fund, directing investment towards projects that deliver measurable, nature-positive outcomes.

We invested £16,500 with Pinwheel across five projects in 2025, spanning carbon removal, nature restoration, and community impact. Pinwheel tracks and verifies the results, so we can show evidence of real-world impact – like destroying 58 tonnes of CO2, planting 1,843 trees in the Andes, and adding 238 metres of new hedgerow in England and Wales.

But as we know, there are limits to what this kind of offsetting can achieve. As positive as all of this is, it’s only a part of our strategy, to be used alongside real-world reduction – and not a shortcut to success.

Looking ahead, we remain fully committed to:

1. Ongoing year-on-year carbon reduction
2. Transparency in reporting
3. Constantly improving how we travel and operate

To do this, we need the entire team to be on board. As Director of Nature, I focus on building the conditions for progress: keeping nature in the room for key decisions, helping teams translate ambition into action, and making sure we keep evolving our approach as the work gets harder. To truly embed this into our culture, carbon reduction is built into our company bonus scheme. It’s a metric that unlocks the team bonus, meaning we all have a shared stake in achieving it. This ensures responsibility is spread across the business and prevents it from becoming siloed

Climate action is about progress, not perfection. It’s about transparency and accountability, showing you the truth, even when it’s not pretty.

It’s not enough to hope for a better world. Reducing carbon is everyone’s job, and we’d love you to join us on this journey.

1. Measure what matters: track carbon intensity, not just total emissions. If you’re growing, efficiency per revenue or per project is not always an accurate measurement and may hide your real progress.

2. Reduce first. Offset second: offsets are a complement, not a shortcut. Cut avoidable travel, prioritise lower-carbon transport, and rethink necessity before compensating.

3. Make it cultural, not procedural: a policy won’t change behaviour. Training, visible targets, leadership ownership and everyday decision-making will.

4. Choose year-on-year accountability: baseline years flatter results. Year-on-year reductions demand continuous improvement and real transparency when progress slows.

5. Put carbon in every commercial decision: treat carbon like cost and time. Build it into planning, budgets and KPIs. When it’s considered early, better outcomes usually follow.