28th October, 2024
The UK’s aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), recently consulted on providing environmental information to air travel consumers. The CAA requested input on a draft set of principles for airlines and companies that advertise or sell flights to follow when calculating and providing environmental information to the public.
The purpose of environmental labelling is to provide buyers with information and context on the environmental impacts of products, allowing people to compare products and make informed choices. This can help to change consumption patterns and push service providers to offer less environmentally damaging products in response to consumer demand. Labelling flights could have a positive impact: public awareness of aviation emissions has been shown to be low, but consumers have indicated that they want to receive this information. Historically, flight providers have not been compelled to share this information – it was only in 2022, in the CAA’s ‘Environmental Sustainability Strategy’ and in the Jet Zero Strategy’s ‘influencing consumers measure’ that the concept of providing consumers with the negative environmental impact was first outlined. In early 2023, the CAA followed up on these strategies with a call for evidence (see our submission here), looking at what environmental information should be provided to people when they are looking for flights.
We strongly support accurate and easy to understand information being provided to consumers at or before the point of sale and would like to see this implemented as soon as possible. While the CAA’s consultation presented several options, our full response was written with this specific objective in mind.
Key Messages:
In parallel, the European Commission has been consulting on its approach to creating a Flight Emissions Label for airlines. AEF’s response to this consultation can be viewed here.