from the National Archives of Korea, 81 thousand people boarded on airplanes for overseas business trips. As mentioned above, the number of employees who go abroad for business trips was counted and business trips between domestic cities were excluded.
The reference product system for having overseas business trips by using airplanes is that 81 thousand workers would have continued using airplanes. This scenario includes the following steps within the comparative study boundary:
• The number of employees who replace international physical meetings with telepresence
• The number of airplanes that are expected not to be operated
The total flight distance is calculated and the result is presented in Table 13. Based on the by the National Information Society Agency, approximately 1.1% of companies have adopted telepresence for virtual meetings as of 2010, and it was calculated that 896 business travellers among 81 thousand64can replace their overseas conferences by telepresence. In reality, companies which adopt telepresence are not expected to replace all their travelling; however, in this report, 100% of replacement of travelling is assumed due to lack of data.
Table 13 − Comparative assessment of the effects of telepresence
Functional unit
|
Reference product system
|
ICT service
|
To allow the business travellers to attend meetings with their counterparts
|
GHG emission from airplanes due to conference participation when telepresence is not adopted.
|
GHG emission coming from replacing overseas conferences by telepresence implementation
|
Flight distance
|
469.095 million km
|
469.066 million km
|
The point here is that the use of airplanes is assumed to be decreased only by 6.52 after implementing telepresence since the average number of passengers per airplane is 137.3265,66. The passenger decrease by about 895 travelers cannot lead to reducing dramatically the number of airplanes. As a result, 28 thousand km of flight distance was reduced.
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Potential GHG abatement
Fuel consumption in the reference product system is assessed by applying the calculation method for the category ‘movement of people’ as presented in Table 3 using the related values in Table 13. The reduced GHG emission by the decreased number of operating flights is assessed by multiplying an emission factor of flight to the reduced travel distance of flights. In 2011, 0.86 million tCO2e of GHG emission is expected to be cut down as a result of telepresence67.
According to by the National Information Society Agency, the number of companies that start to use telepresence has increased by 32.82% of CAGR. It is assumed that the penetration rate of telepresence will increase at the same rate as the published data, 32.82%. By assuming that GHG emission reduction by telepresence is proportional to the adoption of telepresene, potential GHG abatement by telepresence would increase at the same CAGR of 32.82%. It is estimated that 11 million tCO2e of GHG emission is reduced by the use of telepresence.