Plans for London and an upcoming report on flight paths

15th January, 2010

Having closed our office for a few days over the Christmas break this roundup of AEF’s activities covers the past 4 weeks.

Keeping up our climate work following the publication of the CCC’s aviation report in December, AEF has written, together with several other NGOs, to the Transport Secretary highlighting the need for a review of the Air Transport White Paper. Tim, meanwhile, has continued his international climate work, taking part in a day-long teleconference of the UN’s ICAO on improving the transparency of the organisation’s carbon calculator.

We’ve made several planning-related consultation responses in recent weeks: a follow-up to our meeting with ICE on their future aviation scenarios, and comments on both the Mayor’s Replacement London Plan and his Transport Strategy for the capital. Continuing the focus on London we also met with a researcher from the New Economics Foundation who is developing an alternative cost benefit analysis, ‘social return on investment’, for a third runway Heathrow, and Nic spoke at a meeting of a local political party in Windsor on the likely environmental impacts of such an expansion.

Tim has been writing a report for the Heathrow campaign group HACAN on the impact of more concentrated flight paths and Cait has been working on a report reviewing all the UK’s noise action plans and whether they satisfy the requirements of the Environmental Noise Directive. And we still found time to attend an event at the House of Lords launching the Environmental Law Foundation’s new report on cost barriers to environmental justice.

New on the website in the past few weeks has been commentary on the outcome of the Copenhagen conference, news on a report from the Environmental Audit Committee (quoting AEF), and information about studies at Imperial College London and from the German Government on the health impacts of aviation. We’ve also updated our ‘about us’ page to reflect recent staff changes.