UN climate work intensifies as we begin work on our response to the UK policy consultation: a Summer summary

17th September, 2012

With Parliament in recess from the middle of July until the end of August, summer is often a quiet catching up period at AEF. This year, though, a lot of Tim’s time was taken up with volunteering duties at the Olympics. Alongside this, the work of the UN’s ICAO to agree a global approach for tackling greenhouse gas emissions has intensified and Tim has been engaged in a series of meetings to further work on possible ‘market based measures’.

In relation to UK policy, following publication of the draft aviation framework just before the recess, AEF met with the Department for Transport’s policy team to provide our initial thoughts. We also met with the Department’s forecasting team to discuss our paper analysing the latest passenger demand projections. In August we published the summer edition of our members’ newsletter Flying Green, together with a 6-page briefing on the draft UK policy, and as part of our consultation response, Nic has been working on an analysis of industry claims in relation to aircraft fuel efficiency improvements.

With future policy on South East airports unclear, Cait met with a number of local authorities to discuss policy gaps left by the South East Airports Taskforce (on which AEF was the sole non-industry representative), which focused exclusively on the passenger experience. She has also been engaging with politicians in the main opposition parties as they consider their party lines on aviation and has been advising some of the larger environmental NGOs in relation to aviation and climate change.

Finally, the aviation industry has been considering its environmental performance on various fronts, and this summer saw us participating in research by BAA on how Heathrow noise management compares to other airports world-wide and meeting with Airports Council International Europe (the airport trade association) to discuss carbon management at airports. Tim currently chairs the stakeholder advisory group providing comment and guidance to the UK industry body Sustainable Aviation and in August met with the Programme co-ordinator to discuss the organisation’s work programme.