Are any governments promoting work from home as an effective solution to decreasing pollution and CO2 emissions?

Question

There's much talk about work from home: efficiency, people who like it, people who don't, but I didn't see any policy talk, by governments, about its impact on the environment and whether it should be seen as a tool to fight climate change.

How Working from Home can lower Global Emissions: Walter Tobé, Canon.

Governments around the world are now looking to solutions that involve flexible work to help tackle issues such as congestion in cities, high office prices and elderly employment.

But beyond improving time productivity for employees, there are many environmental benefits associated with homeworking. Not only does it reduce travel distances and fuel consumed, it also avoids excess energy consumption in the office.

And through these benefits, homeworking can actually contribute to meeting global targets for emissions reductions and energy demand.

In the UK alone – where the number of people working from home in the UK increased by 13% between 2007 and 2012 – homeworking has the potential to reduce carbon emissions by over 3 million tonnes a year.

Remote work is a huge opportunity for high-impact climate policy, May 5, 2020.

Amid the immense hardship of the Covid-19 pandemic, one unexpected bright spot has emerged: residents from Los Angeles to New Delhi are reporting unprecedented smog-free skies—the result of a drastic reduction in vehicle-based and industrial air pollution.

What could work-from-home climate policy look like?

First, policy makers should consider tax breaks to companies that support employees working from home at least part of the time. The benefit should be proportionate to carbon emissions avoided, with credible third parties tasked with verifying emissions reductions. This could be coupled with broad-based policies to support high-speed internet connections, and legislative reforms similar to the federal Telework Enhancement Act of 2010.

Second, policies encouraging or requiring eligible employees to work from home, either full-time or part-time, can be a meaningful part of corporate emissions-reductions goals, which are increasingly relevant to consumers and investors alike. Businesses also should encourage employees to walk, bike, or take public transportation on days they do come into the office, by reimbursing related expenses.

In light of these "unprecedented smog-free skies," are any governments actively promoting work from home policies (such as those given above) as an effective way to reduce CO2 emissions for the purpose of meeting the challenges of climate change?

Answer 1

They aren’t, mostly because the potential emissions savings are (surprisingly) small.

The first report you cite estimates that homeworking in the UK could save about 3 million tonnes of CO2 annually. The UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions were about 452 million tonnes in 2018, so the estimated reduction would translate to just 0.7% of all emissions.

Calculating the carbon savings of working remotely vs working from an office is surprisingly complex and some research suggests that for some workers, working from home doesn’t lead to a reduction in emissions at all. A BBC article from earlier this year explains that heating (or cooling) individual workers’ homes is a lot less efficient than managing energy consumption in a single office building, to the degree that the extra energy used can outweigh what is saved by not commuting to and from the office.

So while some experts believe that the Covid-19 pandemic will lead to a transformation of work and office culture, it’s not clear that this should be accelerated or encouraged from a climate point of view.

And while it is undoubtedly good for the environment to reduce the number of petrol and diesel cars on the road, shifting millions of people to remote work might not be the easiest or indeed most sustainable way to achieve that.

It’s worth noting that the pandemic does seem to have given renewed urgency to broadband rollouts, digitalisation programmes and the like, so governments are looking at investing into these sectors. Here is an FT article on the UK government’s stimulus plans which mentions broadband improvements. It just doesn’t look like the climate aspect is a significant driver of these proposals.

Answer 2

Are any governments promoting work from home as an effective solution to decreasing pollution and CO2 emissions?

Make 60% ‘Work from Home’ Permanently?, Sep 23, 2020

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is adding a new carbon-reduction strategy to its “Plan Bay Area 2050 Final Blueprint” document – a mandate that large companies that currently have the majority of their staff working from home as part of the COVID-19 lockdown continue to do so permanently.

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The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is the government agency responsible for regional transportation planning and financing in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was created in 1970 by the State of California, with support from the Bay Area Council, to coordinate transportation services in the Bay Area's nine counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma. The MTC is fourth most populous metropolitan planning organization in the United States. (Wikipedia)

In September 2020, the MTC updated their blueprint for the year 2050. Among the items is a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by requiring telecommuting.

Plan Bay Area 2050: Final Blueprint, September 11, 2020

Strategy Objective Reduce greenhouse gas emissions, traffic congestion, and transit overcrowding by increasing the number of Bay Area workers that work from home one or more days per week.

Strategy Description Build upon the significant shift to work from home during COVID-19 and mandate that large employers have at least 60 percent of their employees telecommute on any given workday. This requirement would be limited to large office-based employers whose workforce can work remotely. [...] This could enable an increase from the projected telecommute share of 14 percent in the Draft Blueprint to up to as high as 25 percent in the Final Blueprint, recognizing that half of the workforce has a job that must be completed in-person (not eligible for telecommuting). The policy would require the employer to meet this target each workday. Employers could meet this target using any variety of alternative work options, such as compressed work weeks, flexible work schedules, or remote work policies.