A new report from the World Wildlife Fund, “From Workplace to Anyplace: Assessing the Global Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions With Virtual Meetings and Telecommuting,” is worth checking out. It includes background research on the drivers for and barriers to adopting telecommunications technologies among policy makers, business leaders and end users. Not surprisingly, saving the environment isn’t a key driver—in fact, it’s the lowest-ranked reason for videoconferencing. Efficiency, saving money and social improvements top the list, confirming that to encourage lasting behavioral change, communicators need give people a payoff beyond simply doing the right thing and feeling good about it.

As an aside, the headline, “Report: Teleworking Could Cut U.S. Climate Emissions in Half” on the Sustainable Life Media news item first alerted me to the study. It made me say “Wow!” But it tells a different story than the research report, which estimates that telecommuting and virtual meeting tools worldwide could cut CO2 emissions by about 3.5 million tons by 2050—the equivalent of half the United States’ current emissions. The headline implies that if U.S. businesses boosted telecommuting, virtual meetings and the like, we’d cut our emissions in half—I only wish that were so.

Update, 4.04: Sustainable Life Media has changed the opening sentence of its piece in response to my comments. I have to add (as I should have the first time around), SLM has terrific editorial standards, and if they were less than pros, a slip like this wouldn’t be worth a mention.