Table 13 - Pitt’s Directly Financed Outsourced Travel for All GHG Inventory Years

from University of Pittsburgh, Fiscal Year 2019 Greenhouse Gas Inventory, Pittsburgh Campus

by University of Pittsburgh, Sustainability

4.1.2 University Fleet

Services, travel tracking software, and others. In FY17, separately funded Athletics travel was included; it was not provided nor included in FY19.

Pitt Purchasing has records of both travel reimbursements and travel card purchases, the latter of which is directly billed to the University. In FY08, the various modes of financed travel were recorded as a single entry into the reimbursement statement, which also included items such as hotels, per diem, and meals. In FY11, university departments began switching to a new network-based system for recording reimbursements and travel card purchases, which provided more comprehensive travel expense data. This system continues to be used, so travel data for FY14, FY17, and FY19 includes descriptions of the nature of the expenses, allowing for more accurate disaggregation between air and land travel expenses. It is estimated that in 30% of all reimbursements were filed using the new system in FY11, which was used for up to 70% of travel purchases in FY14, and 90% in both FY17 and FY19. Increasing data inclusion and accuracy makes it difficult to directly compare the emissions between FY08, FY11, FY14, FY17, and FY19 for this category.

It was previously common for faculty and staff to book travel through a Pitt travel agent, which meant a third source of travel expense had to be tracked. However, Pitt has integrated its travel system so that all travel card and reimbursement charges are now tracked internally via Concur.

Once all travel expense data was aggregated, it was separated into the following three modes: air travel, bus travel, and rail travel. To avoid the need of another conversion factor outside of SIMAP, the aggregate monetary values for each travel mode were input directly into SIMAP, which performs calculations using its own factors.

In FY19, Pitt faculty and staff purchased $11,769,526 worth of air travel, and traveled an estimated

303,572 land miles, resulting in total emissions of 37,142 MT CO2e. From FY17 to FY19, land miles increased by about 8% from FY17 to FY19, a total of 21,899 miles. In all of the previous inventories, the air mileage was estimated from the travel expense data and showed an increase in miles traveled with each inventory. However, SIMAP allows for direct input of dollars so this estimation only added uncertainty to our calculations. Starting in FY19, and for inventories moving forward, the air travel GHG emissions will be calculated by inputting the travel expense data as dollars and reporting the GHG emissions from SIMAP which can be seen in Table 13.

Over past inventories, GHG emissions increases due to Air Travel from FY08 to FY14 is attributed to improved documentation. The drop between FY14 and 17 is not explained, but the resurgence of emissions in FY19 indicates that university-related air travel rebounded in FY19.

Due to varying levels of detail in reported data and changing conversion factors used to translate dollar values to miles prior to this inventory, land mile estimates have fluctuated rapidly from inventory to inventory.

Increasing data tracking and conversion to emissions for both land and air travel is needed in future inventories.