Teleworking one more day a week would reduce transport emissions by 3%

If companies added one more day of teleworking to the week, transport emissions would be reduced by 3% in cities such as Madrid or Barcelona. This is the conclusion of Greenpeace’s latest report “A year of teleworking: its impact on mobility and _CO2 emissions”, which analyses the impact of teleworking, after a year in which working from home has skyrocketed due to travel and meeting restrictions. In this way, the promotion of teleworking could save between 400 tons of carbon dioxide (CO) per day.₂) in the Community of Madrid or 600 tons in the province of Barcelona (due to its greater displacement between municipalities on the periphery), just by providing an additional day to those jobs that can be exercised from home.

With this report, Greenpeace highlights that the boost to teleworking during the pandemic can be a stimulus towards more flexible and climate-friendly work patterns. In Spain, transport is the main emitter of greenhouse gases, motivated above all by the traffic of diesel and gasoline cars, who are also responsible for the poor air quality suffered by Barcelona or Madrid, the city that leads the deaths from pollution in Europe, as recently denounced by the Institute of Global Health.

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the implementation of teleworking in many sectors. A year later, many people continue to work from home totally or partially, a modality that, in addition to saving resources and time in daily commutes, can also contribute to reducing polluting emissions. Greenpeace has counted the carbon footprint of commuting to work, calculating the number of kilometres travelled and the means of transport used. It also counts the jobs that could be performed from home and how many of them were already teleworking before the pandemic. In this way, the impact that the application of one or two additional days of teleworking would have on all emissions linked to mobility is obtained.

In addition, the profile of people who could assume one or two more days of teleworking a week more easily has been evaluated. In general, these are people with university education, who work as employees in qualified positions, and aged between 35 and 55 years. Precisely these profiles, especially men, are the ones who use the car the most to go to work, the most polluting mode of transport.

“Promoting teleworking is an effective and rapid measure to reduce transport emissions in the short term, since the people who pollute the most are those who could telework more easily,” said Adrián Fernández, head of Greenpeace’s mobility campaign. “During this pandemic we have seen many companies discover the benefits of telecommuting, avoiding thousands of commutes and contributing to a cleaner and less congested city,” he adds.

However, Greenpeace warns that a large majority of the working class cannot assume the benefits of teleworking when performing face-to-face tasks, many in essential sectors such as health, care, cleaning or transport. For this reason, the environmental organization recalls that the promotion of teleworking must be one more piece in a systemic change towards affordable and environmentally friendly mobility for all people.

In this sense, and thinking about those who must continue to attend to their jobs, Greenpeace demands that local, regional and state entities take advantage of post-covid reconstruction to reinvent a fairer mobility model. To this end, the promotion of teleworking must be complemented by a powerful and competitive public transport network, an urban model of proximity that avoids long journeys by car and a distribution of public space in favor of walking and cycling, the most sustainable ways of moving around the city. And he points out that only in this way will it be possible to avoid that the promotion of teleworking, a priori positive, does not suppose a new social gap that harms those who cannot work from home.

Source: ABC