Measure and reduce your organisation's emissions generated by your employees daily commute to work using "Abley CarbonWise".
What do the results mean?
Capturing trips to and from work is complicated, and so is calculating carbon emissions. Additionally, each person’s and each organisation’s context is unique. This page aims to help you understand your survey results, and why they may not be what you expected.
What does CarbonWise measure?
The CarbonWise survey calculates the emissions from your trips to and from work, based on your survey answers, and estimates the amount in a full working year. The idea is to estimate your annual commuting emissions from a snapshot of how you travel during a week, so that you don’t have to fill out a survey every week.
What the results don't include
These results do not include your other emissions such as business travel (travelling to meetings or to another work site), energy use at home, or personal trips taken for leisure.
If you use a company vehicle for commuting, note that kilometres travelled and emissions from using this vehicle are likely to be captured elsewhere by your employer (e.g. through fuel cards, reports from the fleet vehicle provider, telematics data). Therefore, these emissions are not counted as commuting emissions and your results may show zero carbon, or a low value. This does not mean your trips are free of emissions, just that these are captured elsewhere.
Common reasons for unexpected results
- The use of a company vehicle (see previous section), meaning these emissions are not counted as commuting emissions.
- When an employee travels to a different city for work, this is considered “business travel”. These emissions are captured by the organisation via other means than the CarbonWise survey. For example, travel management systems provide reports on air travel, rental vehicles, and accommodation which can be used to calculate business travel emissions. To avoid counting these twice, CarbonWise excludes emissions from trips using company vehicles. Likewise, if you are based in Auckland but travel to Nelson for work, the long distance trip is corrected by CarbonWise to only include a short commuting trip (e.g. from your hotel to the workplace).
- Generally, we have to make general assumptions to calculate commuting emissions, otherwise the survey would be much longer and require much more detailed information from respondents.
- We ask respondents to fill out the survey for commuting trips they have taken in the past week. This is because we need real data, on trips that have actually taken place, rather than hypothetical trips employees would “typically” make. This approach avoids biases and unreliable information. As a result, if a respondent submitted an answer for a week that was untypical for them, their results would not be representative of the rest of the year. At the scale of the organisation, the snapshot is valid because employees may be on leave, on business trips, or doing something unusual at different times of the year.
- In order to calculate emissions from motorised vehicles, we use standard emission factors (quantity of CO2 equivalent per kilometre travelled) defined by the Ministry for the Environment. For each fuel type (petrol, diesel, electric, etc) these are average values that represent the entire New Zealand vehicle fleet. If the vehicle you use has significantly higher or lower than average emissions, your calculated commuting emissions will not be fully representative.
- Despite extensive user testing and improvements to the survey interface, respondents can sometimes misunderstand the information that is expected of them. If you think there was a mistake, you can take the survey again by refreshing your browser, and entering the same email address. The software will ask you to confirm whether you would like to overwrite your previous answer.
Contact us
Ria Chapman
Innovation Manager